They have productivity benefits for some things true, but they don't expose or constrain operations very well (ie, I have seen "professionals" do stuff like "rm

They have productivity benefits for some things true, but they don't expose or constrain operations very well (ie, I have seen "professionals" do stuff like "rm -rf ~/ folder" before accidentally) . CLI's are generally only good at administration tasks (such as moving files around). In the vast majority of cases though, a good GUI would probably be more productive to work with. But once again, that's my opinion. Until CLI's can expose tasks better, their benefits will be limited.