Well, that's true only insofar that _all_ non IOS customers are making up a smaller fraction of Apple's customers. Within the PC/Laptop Crowd, I think the technical enthusiast/Hacker group is pretty important to that product line. They certainly put a lot more effort into their Terminal Application than Microsoft does. Does Microsoft even offer a Terminal Application? I typically download SecureCRT/Putty. Also - Does microsoft come with SSH?

I guess the point I'm trying to make is "Hackers are important to Apple, insofar that that Macintosh PC/Laptop line is important to Apple."

Have you seen this blog before: http://blog.commandlinekungfu.com/ ALl the things you never knew you could do with Bash (at least a modern Linux one) and Powershell (and occasionally cmd.exe)

Also -- MS now support a full headless installation (no Explorer etc) on Server 2008: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.02.geekofal...

PowerShell (Windows' shell as of 7) is actually really nice, but it doesn't make any attempt at all to ease the transition to and from *nix shells.

The shell itself is ok, but it still has a rubbish interface / terminal emulator. It's a Corvette engine wrapped in a rusted out Yugo chassis.

It has aliases for a few built in unix commands... but could be more harmful than helpful. Like Javascript, C++ and Java all have 'similar' syntaxes.