This would let you implement the UNIX "everything is a file" philosophy on windows.

Although I feel guilty because that's probably more the Plan 9 philosophy. On Linux you get a lot of nice things by having /procfs for example but lots of things aren't files that might be. I've often wondered if a file based interface to dbus wouldn't be very liberating from the scripting point of view for example.

Plan 9 even does sockets via a file based interface and to my eyes it's no more clunky than BSD sockets - but presto, any bash script would be able to open a socket without netcat.