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Hmm lots of good points. I agree with you Alex that a GUI is an excellent paradigm for presenting a limited set of options in an easily accessible manner. However, once you need to do more than a limited set of tasks GUI's become a handicap. An illustration of this is Word vs. Tex for typesetting complex documents. I admit Word is much simpler to learn, but its a lot harder to achieve the same level of productivity and quality for non-trivial tasks. The reason is because in a WYSWIG editor you basically have to tell the program exactly where and how you want every visual element, whereas in Tex you simply tell the program what you need and let it figure out the best way to do it. And because Tex is command driven you have ultimately much more flexibility, you can even specify exactly how you want things positioned like in a WYSWIG. @Harry I guess I'm saying here that I would pick vim over Word (or any WYSWIG approach) any day :-)
So perhaps we need to make a distinction here between Command Interfaces and Command line interfaces. For instance, Alex when you talk about using the keyboard in explorer what you're doing is using a command interface rather than a point-and-click interface. This ties in with what Nat was saying before.
I also agree that GUIs have been very good at easing the initial adoption of computer use, but that's precisely my point. It's time we moved beyond the initial phase.
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