I work part-time at Intellectual Ventures Labs, which enables me to get out of the house and exercise the nerdy predilections that I used to exercise at Blue Origin. This is a sort of all-purpose science lab and thing-making facility where new inventions are developed.

True, CLI is just an abstraction, a metaphor, but it's a layer or two closer to what's really going on. I grew up typing BASIC on my C-64, but after I upgraded to a Mac SE I spent 10 years using only GUIs until "In the Beginning was the Command Line" (by Neal Stephenson) inspired me to explore the world underneath. The passage on Emacs as the Hole Hawg of text editors is hilarious, and after reading that I totally wanted to be a Morlock instead of an Eloi. That essay was my gateway drug into Linux. It's getting dated by it's still relevant.
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

You're right when it comes to servers or desktops, but for laptops it's a different story. Sleep or hibernate are often not supported by Linux on laptops, and given the increasing market share of laptops vs. desktop, boot time is something to pay attention to.