[pjc50]

It's almost better. It's good for automating some system administration tasks. It's not so good for text processing; there are a number of traps and mis-steps. The object pipelines are great, but have to be held in memory (you can't pipe an intermediate state to disk). By default text output wraps at the terminal width even if you're writing to a file, which is just stupid and inconvenient for further automatic processing.

In order to write a script, you first have to change your system security settings.

More subtly, because it's comparatively new it's not very dogfooded and there isn't a rich source of examples. UNIX systems usually have lots of shell scripts in /etc for you to learn from.