that's a lazy half-measure. Following that line of thought, they should ditch inefficient mouse-driven interfaces altogether, and learn to love minimalist window managers.
Why doesn't Microsoft just bring back Xenix? It's based on Unix, so it's stable, has a good command-line, and ought to be nice and efficient if they make a few improvements to it. According to Bill Gates it was the highest-volume AT&T-based Unix for a long time, so it definitely has potential.
Or if that's too much of a compatibility issue, just replace the start menu/task bar/start screen with a Bash-like command prompt that runs on the Unix subsystem of NT. You could still start all your GUI programs like Civilization and Minesweeper from the command prompt, just like typing "write" in a Run prompt starts Word Pad today. But for productivity tasks, it'd be a huge step forward. Sure, the Unix NT layer might need some polished since it hasn't been fully integrated since Win2K or so. But all the savings on the front-end of today's Windows would free up more than enough resources to have it ready within a couple years.
<-- although a better command prompt
would be nice
progman was an iconic feature of Windows. I'm sure if enough people had refused to upgrade to Vista, despite never actually using the start menu, because of the lack of progman, MS would have put it back into Win7.
Does the Windows 3.11 version of program still work on 32-bit Windows 8.1? If so, then Microsoft would've had no reason to put it back in 7. Who knows, maybe there's someone out there today still using Program Manager on their Windows 8.1 install.
I know it was still mostly functional on XP 32-bit (besides some Y2K compatibility issues that it exhibits on 3.11 these days as well), so it might work on Windows 6.x 32-bit, too. I may have to try this on the Windows 9 preview.
Even if the 3.11 version doesn't work so great, the NT 3.51 version might work, and if they updated it at all for 95 (which I can't remember if they did, or if the included progman was the same as the 3.11 version), the 95 version might work.