Powershell is awesome. Piping collections of objects instead of lines of text makes half of the great unix utilities (grep, sed) irrelevant. I used to gripe about the command line itself (Bash's tab completion, for example, trumps) but this is more than fixed by Powershell 3's ISE (in Win8).

Doesn't address your remote access... SSH is really nice and lightweight and the fact that Vim works is great for real sticky problems. Powershell has a remote access mode but I can't say I know much about it.