One issue with all this is that the GNU tools are vastly superior to older ones (in terms of extra functionality) but most people never have the misfortune to have to use other unix systems that don't have them.
Imagine tar without the 'z' option, find with only 'name' as a predicate, and so on. While some people complain about the command line, it is several times worse on other systems which use the more traditional tools. Carl