MS is developing a new shell for some time now. Microsoft changed the Name from MSH into Monad into the so incredible cool and unique buzzword “PowerShell”. Good work marketing guys! Especially the acronym “ps” is a really good idea…

Ok, despite that stupid name, the PoSh is now available as RC1 for download.

Its not just an addon like the Scripting Host, its a replacement for the gold old cmd.exe in Vista (server?)
Its based on .NET and its object oriented. The Pipling (output of so called cmdlets) is not (only) textbased as one might expect from a shell its and .NET object the every cmdlet (command-let) returns.