I'm mainly referring to the (more or less central to linux) concept that everything is a file, and that you pass informatation between programs by pipelining text (and, if necessary, saving binary information to file that gets read by the next process).

I think Powershell is just a modern take on what makes the Unix shell powerful. But instead of files and text, it's structured data.

A lot of unnecessary parsing and happens in unix tools. Programs generate a lot of structured data, dump as human-structured text, which is then parsed by the next tool, processed, dumped as more text, parsed again by the next tool, processed, etc. Right now I'm working with an SDK that does it and it actually needs Python code to parse the output from different tools to glue them together.