That may very well be...the guy that created powershell always says that Unix is document oriented configuration while windows is API oriented configuration. To do anything in Windows you have to know API's. To be fair someone has to write the code that parses all of those config files in Unix...but I think the over all idea is accurate.

They are changing that with PS Desired State Configuration...if you haven't seen it you should check it out. But you are right...it's coming from a different place than Unix shells.