Personally, I hate the Hole Hawg story. It reeks of pretentiousness and gatekeeping, and worse, the description of the Hole Hawg isn't even accurate. "A cube of metal"? That's not what a quick image search shows. "You screw a second handle in"-- except that the second handle is already there. "It's not sleek" -- again, a image search shows a perfectly normal handle with a perfectly normal grip.

The Unix command line has a lot to recommend it. Notably, the simple ergonomics of the pipeline are indeed great (other OSs have similar pipeline concepts; they just don't get used the same way because they are too clunky).