MS bringing back Services for Unix for real is a somewhat orthogonal issue than coming up with a superior shell.
Specially when they take UNIX way of computing as the only way, without room for any improvement.
I'm a bit of a bash scripting nut, but I've recently had to do some Windows administration via Powershell and actually it's pretty awesome!
I want Windows shell to look like UNIX, to be scriptable exactly the same, and to have a proper SSH remote login.
So install Cygwin.
Apple managed to do this with OS X.
OS X uses a Unix shell. Most of it is based on Unix principles. It wasn't that hard!
Microsoft is denying the reality and substituting it with their own.
Really? It still uses pipes and redirection, has command history and tab completion. You can alias commands, but Powershell has functions which allow for parameters.
The thing is - Powershell is, somewhat surprisingly, more powerful in many ways than bash, especially around variable handling. I'd be pretty happy if it was ported to Linux, which I'm actually rather surprised about!
Your NiH assertion doesn't even remotely make sense. PowerShell is fundamentally different from traditional Unix shells and has many interesting, unique & innovative features. Not liking them or agreeing with the philosophy is entirely valid, but suggesting they've just refused to use an existing shell because of NiH isn't born out by the facts.
Honestly, I'd suggest trying to adapt an existing Unix style shell to Windows as the "official" shell would be an inherently bad idea at worst and extremely difficult at best. Apart from the numerous issues that traditional shells have which PowerShell seeks to address (reliance on string parsing, lack of consistency in commands/parameterss, etc...), traditional Unix shells are very much built around a Unix operating system philosophy, especially wrt. exposing operating system internals, devices, etc... via the file system. That's a great thing, but it's not so much applicable to Windows.
You'd either need to radically re-design large chunks of the system to conform to the Unix philosophy of exposing much of the system via the file system, which let's face it, is unlikely to happen, much less any time soon, or augment the shell with a lot of extra support for Windows specific functionality (e.g. the Registry, WMI, etc...). Things as simple as ACLs on Unix won't even map nicely. Better to have a shell that works well for Windows and fits its administrative model than trying to shoe-horn in a shell designed with a completely different administrative philosophy in mind.
You mention OS X, and yes, they did get it to work. As other commenters have mentioned though, OS X is UNIX. As in, UNIX(R). The userland API exposed by the kernel is based off BSD, as are large chunks of the operating system (although, Apple seems to be replacing them one by one). It's pretty easy to use a nix shell when your operating system is largely based on Unix (at least, from the perspective of userland applications).
I have in my notes:
<pre>Select-String " 23:56.00" -Path file.txt | out-string -width 10000</pre>
better (no headers):
<pre>Select-String " 23:56.00" -Path file.txt | ForEach-Object { Write-Output $_.Line } | Out-File t.txt</pre>
I eventually installed a proper grep and gave up trying to use Select-String.
The hoops you have to jump through to write and run script files are absurd as well, compared to UNIX where you just need to set the executable bit.
I guess PowerShell has a different take on things.