None of the examples really sound all that exciting. I see the Unix shell more of a text file manipulation toolkit, so apart from some corner cases I'm not sure

None of the examples really sound all that exciting. I see the Unix shell more of a text file manipulation toolkit, so apart from some corner cases I'm not sure if adding MIME types etc really would add much value for the usual tasks. If you're adding too much structure to things, you might as well go all the way and base everything around a programming language or framework (cf. Oberon, Powershell, Lisp Machines). I agree that emulating a terminal from the late 70s isn't exactly the peak of programming. Character-addressed terminals are just another way to get (cheap) WIMPy GUIs.