IMO the only drawback is learnability. And it is countered by the fact that you can make some serious gains in productivity with only a little time invested.

IMO the only drawback is learnability. And it is countered by the fact that you can make some serious gains in productivity with only a little time invested. I started really investing in cygwin last year and I'm constantly moving more and more of my work into it. All my coworkers have a tedious build process that involves lots of clicking around windows explorer while mine is a two character sequence that has some other value-add factored in. In addition to these benefits, shell tools take much less memory than gui ones, and I really notice the difference running mysql & psql on the command line vs firing up pgAdmin or MySQL workbench.