Sure, you CAN type line noise.
Or you can use it for a far higher level of grunting.
Or it can be poetry.
Pretty much like any very expressive language.
Those that have spent years programming in straight jackets (or constricted pipe lines with an occasional escape to some 'C') it is a godsend. Kind of like AWK.
I spent years grokking cut, paste, sort, uniq, tr, etc, etc. But the AWK man pages sucked, and each time I tried to use it, I found myself falling back into what I knew.
And then I got the MS-DOS MKS toolkit, which includes really good docs for AWK. 2 years later, I fell into Perl, with an AWK mindset. That worked.
Keep in mind, Perl is an organic aggregation of many unix utilities, then tied together by a single mind. Some utilities, like find, have been turning into a callback engine.
http://perldoc.perl.org/File/Find.html