While that's true for portability (there's obviously reasons why nearly all distros ship with a POSIX sh compatible shell at /bin/sh), for simple tasks on my own system, oftentimes I simply want to get the job done without banging my head against a wall dealing with all the idiosyncrasies of sh. For internal use, I think this project excels for automation and administration tasks. Of course, I probably wouldn't ship anything written in xonsh-python, but I'd totally use it to, say, back up my dotfiles to a git repo automatically.