It's not exactly the same, but I usually do run find(1) with a -print action before I use an -exec action, for one.

The idea of having a standard object structure among all the cmdlets and having it fall back to text is what I'd consider the biggest win, followed by having the system actually used by other tools within the Windows system.

There have been many tools for Windows that could have been the basis for such a standardized approach, but it's good to know they have an interest in making proper system out of it. WSH and VBScript or some random collection of COM objects would not have been as nice.