Now that I'm involved in two PowerShell projects, it's probably only fair that I should spend a little time talking about the non-sharepoint one. The PowerShell Community Extensions -- or PSCX for short -- consists of a group of maybe half a dozen people who are passionate about Monad (there! he said it again! stone him!) who are trying to fill in some gaps in the support for everyday operations that we're used to using from the good old fashioned command prompt. Yes, you can use ping.exe from powershell, but it's not native and if you want to use any of the output you must revert to old-school string parsing a la awk or sed. There's nothing wrong with awk or sed, but it's not the "PowerShell Way." Everything should be an object, right Mr Gosling?
For our upcoming release 1.1, in addition to some reimplementations of existing DOS-based tools, there are some pretty cool extras such as an enhanced Tab-completion system. This is implemented in c# for performance -- as opposed to the current script-based approach -- and can tab complete much more things such as static members, types, and can partially evaluate statements. There are also symlink and filesystem commands, and my contribution: bzip2, gzip, tar and zip creation cmdlets.