* “I believe that if MS are seriously targeting UN*X sysadmins, then they should have these tools out of the box” – it would actually be illegal for them to distribute less out of the box given the copyleft license. They could have duplicated its functionality I guess but I don’t see the point.

chocolatey is actually very easy to install (both automated or manually), but Windows should have had its own package manager a long time ago. It will finally have one in Windows 10 with OneGet.

* history: it Just Works(TM) for me but I can’t argue with your experience. I like the fact that Powershell doesn’t force you to load history from a single source, since I keep separate history for different environments I frequently use, but it would have been ideal for them to provide a function (like they do for tab expansion and the prompt) that defaults to loading a universal history but can be overridden as desired.

* startup time: my machine has an HDD rather than an SSD and it still loads instantly for me (Win 8.1), but again your experience may be different.

*completion: Yes, straight powershell is remiss in this regard, due to the fact that they still haven’t upgraded their terminal UI. powershell_ise does nice tab completion and PowerTab adds proper completion to straight powershell, albeit hacky if you are using the built-in terminal app.

* Logic operations: my bad on that… but the actual rules for when you can use what operator (as well as some of the general syntax) are pretty convoluted in bash too.

* command line arguments: I rarely have to use –% in normal use cases, even when calling executable utilities. In fact I can’t remember a recent time when the standard command line parsing didn’t work other than with imagemagick, which requires the ` character in its syntax.

* execution policy: It even tells you in the prompt how to turn it off – all you have to do is copy-paste what it gives you.

“yes, Powershell is quite powerful, possibly more powerful than UN*X alternatives, but you pay for that power with huge complexity ”

bash has its own kind of complexity, but you’re just used to it by now – and arguably maybe I just plain prefer Powershell’s kind. But ultimately it would be nice to have no issues at all.