But to further clarify, our context was mass administration, which actually requires substantial Powershell knowledge to do...pretty much at all.
Bzzzt. A Windows admin at a medium sized org can get by doing mass administration with just Active Directory/GPO clickity clicks. It's not as efficient, but it works.
you're living in another world if you think *nix admins are some sort of gods when compared to their Windows counterparts
Apparently you didn't read my first post in this thread. A competent 'doze admin is on par with a competent *nix admin. But the *nix admin *has* to do things the command line way for mass-admining, because the GUI just isn't there.
And just so we're clear, I've managed (as an admin not a user) numerous versions of Windows (starting with 98se through 2012), Unices (including HP-UX, Solaris, and IRIX), Linux (RedHat, RHEL, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse, SLE[S/D], Mandrake...), and Macintosh (not counting OSX which is rolled into the Unix bunch). I will admit that there were a lot of GUIfied admin tools for Solaris and IRIX, but nothing like AD's "click a check box and every machine tied to a computer object in tbe OU now has the following mandatory setting that a local admin can't modify".