I'd hazard a guess and say that they didn't use it much and only noticed »Whoa, I have to type Get-ChildItem instead of ls? That's so bloated, get me out of here.«
(Side note: I'm a developer, not an administrator and I use PowerShell as such – I have no clue of how to query AD or manage IIS, but I do know the language very well. I also was a technical reviewer of the PowerShell Cookbook 2nd ed.)
From my experience the language has some quirks (that are being slowly remedied in recent versions, e.g. handling of one-element arrays), but otherwise is quite well designed. The quite consistent naming of cmdlets give you enough hints to figure out what a command would be, if you only knows it exists, e.g. querying things always start with Get, projection is done with Select, etc. In a way, PowerShell is more unixy than traditional Unix utilities in that they really do one thing and only one thing. This can lead some to consider PowerShell overly verbose, because the pipeline often looks like
Get-Things | Select-Things | Format-Things
But to me this is actually nicer because I can concentrate on each part individually and not figure out the switch to ls that tells me the file size. And well, PowerShell passes objects through the pipeline so most of the time you can cut text processing to a minimum because you already get what you need directly (which is not to say that text processing is poor in PowerShell – -match, -replace represent grep and sed and switch -regex is very nice for quickly writing parsers for semi-structured text content).