Powershell actually was created by taking the best of the Unix CLI and rolling in the .NET and COM object model. So it is a Windows flavored superset of the Unix CLI.

You can pass objects and collections of objects in the PowerShell pipes.

Yes. And "manual pages" can be included inside user created functions to behave just like the built in ones. The help information in Powershell can be quite verbose. But it is categorized and the Get-Help cmdlet has switches to show you the basics, certain sections, or the whole content.

TRSDOS > LDOS > MSDOS > DRDOS > MSDOS > Windows > OS2 > Windows. I won't bore you with the version numbers but I will say that I skipped Vista and have no intention of installing Windows 8. I am waiting to see what happens after 8. It very well might be Linux for me.

to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence. The real goal could of had nothing to do with "hiding" the data.

Weight Watchers has already done this. And yes the app reads the UPC not the nutritional information. http://www.weightwatchers.com/templates/Marketing/Marketing_Utool_1col.aspx?pageid=1118811

Except for integration with the desktop search interface you are describing Microsoft Search Server. Do you know that a lite version of the enterprise search built into SharePoint is now free? Your users will have to go to a web site to search the shared folders but there would only be one set of indexes and the indexing is done by a service on the server on a schedule you dictate. Google "Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express"