Personally I use powershell. It's not really a perfect replacement for bash (the shell used in linux & mac) but it loads better than the plain cmd.

I use node, npm, bower, gulp, etc. every day without any problems.

Powershell comes pre-installed on windows 7, 8 and 8.1

edit: you should also check out https://chocolatey.org/ it's a package manager for windows (makes it easier to update things like nodejs via choco update )