Well, Powershell is a proper shell in linux terms – unlike the dreaded cmd.exe (command.com of yore) which is just a glorified batch processor and not even a good one at that. With Powershell you can do proper scripting and – one thing it has over cmd.exe – there is no different language for scripts and for the command line, so you can actually try things on the command line and then write them into a script file.

So in that regard, Powershell is a huge step forward that brings Microsoft Windows from being 30 years outdated to almost up to par with the state of the art of operating systems – at least when doing feature comparison. On the other hand, the implementation is horribly broken, very overly complicated and way to jarring for immigrants from UNIX land than what the Microsoft executives wanted or would have you believe.