[halo]

I'm only speculating, but I imagine telnet was removed because the security issues and misuse vastly outweighed the legitimate use by powerusers.

And I'm not really sold that an OS should ship with a bloated utility like modern wget rather than including a very lightweight downloader.

On the other hand, I think PowerShell is a vastly over-complicated and over-engineered response to the conceptually simple Unix shell, which is why most still favour the command line.

[oblio]

telnetd ok, but telnet itself? What for? Crappy, slow, port scanning?

[lukeschlather]

Removing telnet nudges people to completely stop using telnetd. I know there's a ton of embedded devices that require telnet, but these devices are increasingly going to become a liability and Microsoft probably made a good decision here.

[xorcist]

That doesn't make sense. If I need to configure a switch, test an http server, or whatever it is I need telnet for, I'm going to download PuTTY. No (sane) person ever went "screw that, telnet is insecure, I refuse to do it".