As far as I recall, the original impetus behind what became PowerShell (as handed down to us in a conference room by Ballmer himself, sometime around 2001) was to fill the gap between ops people who did enterprise administration manually with tools like MMC and engineers who automated enterprise administration with tools like C++/DCOM. The latter were necessary in a lot of cases, but they were expensive, and we needed to give the industry a way to do powerful automation without hiring a bunch of PhDs. So, yes, someone did ask for it - the IT industry.
As far as I recall, the original impetus behind what became PowerShell (as handed down to us in a conference room by Ballmer himself, sometime around 2001) was to fill the gap between ops people who did enterprise administration manually with tools like MMC and engineers who automated enterprise administration with tools like C++/DCOM. The latter were necessary in a lot of cases, but they were expensive, and we needed to give the industry a way to do powerful automation without hiring a bunch of PhDs. So, yes, someone did ask for it - the IT industry.