Actually, CMD is much more powerful than COMMAND (the old MS-DOS shell). Firstly, you can enable things like tab-completion (default under WinXP, requires registry trick or TweakUI for older NT variants), and you have a lot of new (powerful) commandos. I do nearly everything through CMD, since it's generally much quicker than through Windows Explorer.
Have a look
here for a lot of tricks and tips. It's mostly batch file oriented, but most things you can do in a batch file are also possible directly from the command line.