[ori_b]

The biggest difference between, bash and, for example, Google, Quicksilver, etc, is the level of fuzziness that they will accept. With Google, you can enter damn near anything you want, and it will accept it and try to do something sensible. With the shell, you get cryptic errors if you have a small typo.

    ls foo(bar)

doesn't list files that look like foo(bar), it says "bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('". It has no method of easily discovering that 'ls' means 'list files'. And typos can potentially harm data.

None of this means that the command line is useless or a bad idea, but it does make it relatively unfriendly towards newbies. Even if the concept is more intuitive, the current incarnation can be scary.