I think you vastly under estimate the usage of command lines by developers. Not to mention opts and admins.

I don't think there is a week that has passed in the last 10 years that I haven't used the command line for something.

To the point of the article, it sounds like the client will handle the work the server once did in parsing the navigation and path commands.

Though the lack of symlinks sounds like it would be the a more painful loss than ".."

Both of these would likely require many *nix utils to be changed to be compatible.