I think this discussion never will converge to an agreement.
Many people are convinced that some kind of tools as shell or emacs are the best way to work and others not. I think there is nothing bad in a GUI which allow to the user do bored tasks more... faster than typing.
For instance, consider the GUI of R program under windows. This is, I think, a basic GUI which has basic functions in its menus (open scripts, load workspaces, change directories, save files, stop processes). Nothing else. It is basic but it helps to the productivity.
In my opinion, an terrible example of a GUI is the R Commander GUI. This seems has been built for people don't like to do nothing except those things are in the menus.