But the answer is still no. You are not relying on DOS. You are relying on a command line interpreter that ships with Windows. It likely has nothing to do with DOS unless you are using a very old version of Windows.
But there is no reason why it should look so ugly in 2011. Linux and OS X have much nicer versions of DOS, although I don't know why they removed the 'dir' command... </s>
I'm a regular Linux/OSX user, but recently needed to do some Windows work. I heard the same things about powershell (powerfull, very nice, just like the ones I'm used to)
It's not. It's limited and it looks ugly as hell. Hated it. Please stop telling people it's good
(but yes, it does support both ls and dir (but strangely there were a few things I could do in cmd that I couldn't do in powershell (can't remember what now though)))
Powershell doesn't solve the biggest problem of dealing with cmd.exe: it's still cmd.exe. It's still running in an identical, terrible, interface. Compare the environment in which it runs to iTerm2 on OS X or even gnome-terminal, and it's sadly, sadly ineffective. Hell, my SSH client is a better "console" than the wrapper around cmd.exe/powershell. (And at times I've used it as such, installing cygwin and sshd solely so I could get a sane console in something that wasn't cmd.exe or rxvt.)
The difference between the Windows console and the a Unix one is that you can't fix the Windows console. Some programs, i.e. Console, try, but the Windows CLI is buried way too deeply in CSRSS and ends up depending so tightly on the crap you see exposed in cmd.exe that attempts to build something better have largely failed.
cmd.exe is just an command interpreter (like bash) that needs a console/terminal (like xterm) just as any other CLI application does.
In other words, is not cmd.exe that sucks, but the Windows console. If Microsoft improved the console, cmd would immediately become nicer to use (though still hobbled by an inane scripting language).
No--cmd.exe is very tightly tied to the underlying command line infrastructure. This is a large part of why alternatives such as Console are so bad--they can only access the command interpreter and infrastructure as a stream, which rules our most character-mode applications. (Cygwin/rxvt get around this by not using the Windows infrastructure at all; curses can be built for Windows and works in cmd.exe, but character-mode code written for cmd.exe will break hard in rxvt.)
Sadly, for most definitions, cmd.exe is the console and the interpreter.
