It was very poor UX (from the demos i saw) -- and i tried it myself in Windows native command terminal and the rendering was horribly broken (windows is a second class OS for dev tools).
A light weight GUI with keyboard shortcuts that mimic CLI experience would have been far better without taking anything away from power users of the terminal.
> ps aux | awk '{if ($6 > 102400) print $11, $6}'
compared to
> Get-Process | Where WorkingSet -gt 100MB | Select Name, WorkingSet
doesn't matter how the output is formatted, you aren't manipulating text directly you're working with .NET objects.
Anyway, PowerShell is the way it is out of necessity of the OS. Microsoft did try to just port ksh to Windows at one point it obviously failed because Windows isn't text based, system state is stored in WMI, COM, etc not text files.
Snover talked about the creation of PowerShell on the Corecursive podcast a couple years ago, well worth a listen: https://corecursive.com/building-powershell-with-jeffrey-sno...