Spend some more time with it to learn the aliases; and try hitting <Tab> every once in a while, it's kinda like having intellisense at the command line. As a system admin, I love powershell and am using it constantly. Granted, it does help that I'm on Exchange 2007 and we have a few Server 2008 boxes deployed. Also, what rabbit994 said is spot on for it's best usage, scripting. Sure, this is largely just MS copying the *nix shell, but it works well and having the .NET API exposed for scripting and command lines is very nice. Like rabbit994, I end up having to add chunks of users all at once (I'm in a University environment) each with a mailbox, a user folder, a web folder and an FTP folder; create the distribution group and security group for the new batch of students, add all of the students to said groups, add those groups to our higher level groups; oh, and while I'm at it make sure that all of the ACL's are correct for each of the student's folders. And, just for the fun of it, I like to keep each batch of students in their own OU in Active Directory, it makes applying group specific GPO's easier. It shouldn't be a big surprise that as a manual process this takes anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes per student. With powershell, I run a script on my laptop which consumes a CSV file of student names and a command line parameter for the group number and within seconds all of that is done for all of the students.
As for it not being on any system I sit down on, that does suck. However, what did you expect MS to do make it a critical patch for all systems? On the other hand, we'll eventually get to that point anyway. Powershell is bundled with Windows 7 and Server 2008. While some folks may hang on to XP until they die, most of us (especially businesses) will upgrade and this problem will simply disappear.