Unix's sheer power is revealed through the Command Line.
Most people think of the CommandLine as a pain. Certainly under MicrosoftCorporation's OperatingSystem's its very limited and not very useful. However to a seasoned Unix user, you can very quickly do almost anything. ThinkGeek has a T-Shirt that says "Go away or I'll replace you with a very small shell script". This is a play on the fact that you can do anything at the command line, including emulating irritating users. The Unix command line has hundreds of programs, and hundreds of ways of stringing them together. cat(1), grep(1), cut(1), awk(1), sed(1), find(1), wc(1), sort(1), uniq(1), test(1), ls(1), cd(1)?, ps(1), kill(1) are basically all the major commands that users use, and yet that is enough to write pretty much any program. See TwoLetterCommands for a longer list of standard utilities.
Almost every program has at least one CommandLine counterpart (eg: mozilla has wget(1), curl(1), w3c(1)....)
Well, yes, to people that aren't used to it I guess it is. Thats what we are trying to help solve in this wiki by making information that you need readily available. Most people that have learnt the Unix CommandLine are able to do things on the command line far faster than people can do it otherwise.
apropos(1) and man(1) are your friends on the command line. Be prepared to do lots of reading (and selective ignoring) at first: Unix commands often have dozens of options that are seldom needed. The man(1) command itself has 24 options! You don't have to memorize it all. If you've just read though the man pages a few times, when you get into a situation where you need a particular command you will think "Ah! That's in the man pages somewhere!" and go to look it up.
One of the best examples I can think of is when you have a large set of files, and you want to do something to only those files that have some characteristic. (Eg rename/move/delete them). You use find(1) for this. The Windows "Find Files" dialog can give you a list of files that contain a certain string, and that's all. This also limits you to documents containing plain text.
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