Re: Bless 'em
I went to a Microsoft DevDays conference back in the early 2000s when .Net was just starting up. Our company wanted both an insider and outsider views, so they sent two of us. I was the Unix guy, the other guy on the team was the Windows guy.
I would say at least of half of what was presented was GUI wrappers for standard Unix functionality that had existed for decades. After one presentation, where my Windows compadre had written about three pages of notes on Microsoft's exciting new interoperability product, he noticed that my Unix-centric notes were somewhat terse. I'd written "Microsoft just invented UUCP". That was pretty much the tone of the the conference.
One of the biggest things that MS was pushing was Intellisense, and their adaptive spell checking technology that was going to really make MS Word super powerful. The example they gave was how Word automatically changed teh to the without any user interaction. My Windows colleague said, "I doubt Unix has anything like that, at which point I reminded him whenever he asked why I continued to use my "ancient" emacs editor, one of the reasons was "abbrev mode"...
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great MS includes these improvements. They're welcome. But I just don't see them as being all that brilliant.
I don't see anything in this new terminal that's not already in the freeware Cmder, which itself takes the console from ConEmu project, so I'm not getting excited about it. On the other hand, making it standard will mean it's available on all machines, and I won't have to carry a portable copy of Cmder around everywhere I go, so that's welcome.