> better than bash in terms of functionality and elegance.

How so? I haven't used it much, but I've not noticed any elegance to it? is it like lisp and if I use it for a while it will hit me what the power of it is?

Much of the functionality stems from being able to use .NET objects in the scripts, and that the result of commands are objects rather than text. For example you can pass the output of ls to a foreach loop that outputs either the absolute or relative path of each file, or various other file properties like size or modification date.

You do have to be careful in some cases because UNIX style syntax is supported but the result may be different because of the underlying implementation. Like if you output text to a file using redirection, by default the output is UTF-16. It can make you crazy if you're not aware of things like that.