Want to know what you can do with network adapters? Run Get-Help AD to see every cmdlet containing AD, and narrow your search from there.
Get-Help auto-updates itself. See a command, but want to know all of the ins and outs (syntax etc) of using it? Run Get-Help [command]. Use the optional -Examples flag to see several well-explained examples. You can even add -Online to get the technet article to launch in your default web browser.
I would think that nix users would feel at home with powershell. Microsoft has made a big push for getting developers to take a second look at Windows. They even set up aliases for common nix commands. Don't type 'dir', just type 'ls' - It works fine.