First, my bona fides: I own a long-standing SharePoint training and consulting company, was one of the first SharePoint MVPs (there were only two of us in the first award cycle for STS), and I continue to devote my professional life to teaching about and extending SharePoint.

What I like: PowerShell. Nearly everything about it. Composability and grammar, pipelining, introspection ... It's a wonderful thing. Installing SharePoint via PowerShell is a system automator's dream, IMHO.

When you're using the Windows machine it's on. Or using objects with remoting support baked in. Or have configured PowerShell remoting, which is a bit of a security black box for me to understand, and also, still requires Windows.

Now, the devops dream, one I think is shared by more people than are willing to speak up about it. I know there are third party apps that enable this dream, but they're so unknown and themselves have security issues, so devops-focused folks haven't embraced it. But with this dream, envisioned with the below sample fictional exchange from my terminal, a new world is open. One with Ansible/Chef/Salt/Vagrant/etc singing in the choir. One with GitHub-hosted repos proclaiming how a new Capistrano plugin will deploy their new ASP.Next app from their Mac development environment to their Windows IIS host. One where I and others can say, "hallelujah, hot damn, now we're talkin'!"

    $ ssh user@windowsserver.example.com
    Connecting to windowsserver.example.com...Connected
    User:PS>