Okay so it is still there, but is it new and improved? Short answer: no.

There has always been talk about the removal of DOS and with every release people point out that the command prompt is still there. Well, as you and I know, this is not DOS but a command shell provided by Windows that is valuable enough to never be removed. While there are new command line tools, the command prompt itself is no different and contains no new features. In fact, if you look closely at the context menus and window properties you will see they are completely identical.

While not a feature of the command prompt itself, one helpful tip is that you can create a shortcut to the command prompt that will run as administrator...

Create a shortcut on your desktop or pin the existing one to your start menu, right click and choose "properties". Click the "advanced" button and select the "Run as an administrator" checkbox. Press OK and you've got a command prompt ready for your "admin" tasks.

While it is disappointing to see no improvements here, Vista does offer some room for us to improve Windows ourselves. In this case I'm referring to the sidebar and the gadgets you can create/install there. A command prompt sidebar gadget is available at the link below along with some documentation on how it was done. There! Now we have some improvement!

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/commandpromptgadget.asp