The word "intuitive" is casually thrown around when talking about interfaces, and yet it has a very specific meaning in HCI, far from what most people believe. As posted in another comment: http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
I don't deny that GUIs have their uses, and that there are certain use cases where they do outperform text-based keyboard-driven interfaces. But the reality is that those use cases are nowhere near as overwhelmingly numerous as GUI proponents make it out to be, and that for the vast majority of text driven tasks (including email, instant messaging, engineering work, doing your taxes, operating points of sale, etc.) they are superior in most regards. Note that I do not advocate abandoning all graphical tools on the computer - you're naturally always going to need an image editor, a video player, something to edit 3D models, etc. The framebuffer is always valuable; GUIs, not so much.
On top of that is the consideration that a lot of our computer use these days converges in the browser, which is a very unusual beast altogether. We originally designed the browser to view documents, and it has now evolved in a weird steam machine that does pretty much anything and everything. It's problematic, because the web is notable for being "disrespectful" of concerns such as accessibility to handicapped users. (note that the best citizens when it comes to such matters, such as Hacker News, Wikipedia, Reddit, and quite a few others, aren't that far off from purely textual interfaces)
Obviously it's going to be hard for me to convince you otherwise in a HN comment. That being said, if you have a genuine interest in the topic, I recommend that you read Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface", and Ted Nelson's series "Computer History for Cynics". They're a good introduction that allows one to think about the design of computer interfaces independently from the GUI mindset that has imposed itself on the profession over the past couple of decades. The modern GUI (which is really Xerox Parc's GUI) is really not all it's made out to be, and there are many compelling things about the alternative branches (check out for example Plan9, for something completely different).
Xerox Parc's GUI changed the world in the Macintosh and Windows, bringing computing to the masses.
The iOS-like GUI changed the world again in the iPhone, Android, and the iPad.
The reason they did is that they were better. Not because they were pretty. You seem to be convinced that these paradigms were not massive improvements on their predecessors. I'm not sure how you manage to maintain that view.
What makes them better is that they are visual in nature. Human beings have an immense amount of latent machinery to help us deal with visual things. Literacy, on the other hand, is an incredibly recent phenomenon. Interfaces that are based on words for communicating semantics instead of primordial visual cues like space, size, contrast, color, movement, etc., will never be able to compete on intuitiveness/ease-of-use/ease-of-learning.
Problem I have with most touch interfaces (and to a wider extent the whole closed iOS ecosystem) is that they still have to show how they actually improve productivity. So far all we've seen is dumbing down the "user experience", turning computers from a productivity and creativity device into a pure media consumption device, glorified TVs basically. This is much much worse then the BASIC home computers of the 80's.
A CLI is more productive, generally while a GUI is more fun. They each have their own use cases. A CLI has an inherent learning curve no matter how great the API, a GUI requires physical interaction delaying potential working.
I don't deny that GUIs have their uses, and that there are certain use cases where they do outperform text-based keyboard-driven interfaces. But the reality is that those use cases are nowhere near as overwhelmingly numerous as GUI proponents make it out to be, and that for the vast majority of text driven tasks (including email, instant messaging, engineering work, doing your taxes, operating points of sale, etc.) they are superior in most regards. Note that I do not advocate abandoning all graphical tools on the computer - you're naturally always going to need an image editor, a video player, something to edit 3D models, etc. The framebuffer is always valuable; GUIs, not so much.
On top of that is the consideration that a lot of our computer use these days converges in the browser, which is a very unusual beast altogether. We originally designed the browser to view documents, and it has now evolved in a weird steam machine that does pretty much anything and everything. It's problematic, because the web is notable for being "disrespectful" of concerns such as accessibility to handicapped users. (note that the best citizens when it comes to such matters, such as Hacker News, Wikipedia, Reddit, and quite a few others, aren't that far off from purely textual interfaces)
Obviously it's going to be hard for me to convince you otherwise in a HN comment. That being said, if you have a genuine interest in the topic, I recommend that you read Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface", and Ted Nelson's series "Computer History for Cynics". They're a good introduction that allows one to think about the design of computer interfaces independently from the GUI mindset that has imposed itself on the profession over the past couple of decades. The modern GUI (which is really Xerox Parc's GUI) is really not all it's made out to be, and there are many compelling things about the alternative branches (check out for example Plan9, for something completely different).