I will admit that I'm not completely comfortable enough with powershell to authoritatively call it 'useful', but could you elaborate on some specific complaints? How much have you used it? From my personal experience, while the syntax has a bit of a learning curve, it is a marked improvement over 'cmd'.
My love/hate relationship with object piping is my chief complaint about PowerShell, but the bigger picture complaint is that applications for Windows simply aren't designed to be used on the command line. You inevitably run into some wacky program that won't place nice with stdin/stdout, or won't let you override some setting without hacking the registry, or otherwise slows you down.
Beyond that, the terminal application UI is utter crap.
