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And I hardly think the registry and PowerShell, which came out nowhere near the same time, were conceived of at the same time.I believe that the registry, in a way, caused PowerShell.
PowerShell works the way it does because Windows is structured data all the way down. A text-based shell a-la bash would not be very useful for Windows sysadmins. If you want to do Windows automation (e.g. on a cluster of windows servers or whatnot), you need to process and manipulate structured data (server settings, user permissions, AD groups, whatever). Hence, a shell and scripting language for doing just that.
If Microsoft hadn't moved from .ini files to the registry between Windows 3.1 and 95, I don't think PowerShell would've had the same design goals as it does now.
