I think the ideal system has an intuitive and exhaustive GUI, but where everything can be scriptable.<p>And a more than ideal system would give you the way to go from GUI to scripting easily. I.e. in any control panel you would have a button at the top that if you click, will make some command windows appear below the current window, which would show you the command line equivalent of anything that you do using the GUI.<p>I am not arguing against having a scriptable OS. I am saying that a GUI makes things a lot easier to understand intuitively, being able to observe the state of the system visually and making it clear what are all the possible options from a given point.