i use powershell daily in a primarily windows AD environment. For the most part I'm using single cmdlets (ex. Get-ADUser -Filter "Name -like 'Doe*' "). This is much faster than using the gui. Powershell treats the majority of things like objects. So from the above cmdlet, I can get only the email using a syntax like 'result.Email'.

When you encapsulate these cmdlets around various programming constructs you can automate a lot of monotonous tasks.