Paul Thurrott writes about the command-line interfaces included in the upcoming Windows Server 2008 and thinks:

"The only problem is, they're offering admins, IT professionals, developers, and other power users two competing command line environments, one old, one new, one based in the murky past, one wrapped in the richest and goodness of Microsoft's modern developer frameworks."

I don't see any real competition. Windows Powershell is by far better and it runs all the old command-line tools cmd.exe is able to run. Paul suggests that Microsoft makes cmd.exe more relevant:

"Windows Server 2008 includes some amazing new Command Prompt-based utilities. Chief among these are servermanagercmd.exe, which Microsoft tells me provides 100 percent of the functionality of the new Server Manager GUI, but in a scriptable, automatable command line version."

Yes, it's amazing to have such a tool, but that has nothing to do with cmd.exe. It works with Powershell too, and it works much better. servermanagercmd.exe outputs xml and Powershell has first class support for processing that. He's wrong. Microsoft does not make the old cmd.exe more relevant. Microsoft makes Windows administration via command-line more relevant.

"and now that you have two command line environments to worry about in Windows Server 2008, your life is going to get harder than ever. "

No, it's going to get much easier. As an admin you can concentrate on Powershell and still use all the cmd.exe knowledge you already have.