If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty excited about Monad. Granted, I'm not your typical bloger, but that's beside the point. ;)

Likewise. Microsoft has always needed a decent shell, a mere 23 years later, and looks like wish granted. :) The CLI has always been one of Windows weakest features. But even so the bloggers been pretty active, Pooja Malpani's post went sky high and etc. And Snover's stuffs got a big play. And all the usual Slashdottisms. Still lotta talk in the blogs, just not from the Bloggerhead Net Search kiddies. :)

I am a command-line-heaven type, but it all seems much more than a strict shell, remote scripting, all with a boatload of cmdlets, on a .NET class, which one-up's Unix, imho. Alot to take in, for the non-professional programmer like me. But drinking in what I can, mainly per the streamlining of text-parsing.

I'm also *very much* looking forward to Monad becoming more mature(like a beta release) - hope it happens next year (disclaimer: that is just a hope from me, and based on a Neowin article[1] making rumors of Longhorn's schedule).

Hope that most products will be nice with Monad as well (for example Windows Media Player shipping with nice cmdlets so you can control it from the console as well.. and of course a cmdletprovider for the media library :D -- sure a third party (like me) could do it in the spare time, but its a lot more nicer that it ships with the product...)