Having no GUI, or an optional GUI, is a side effect of having a full scriptable configuration system.
Since a couple of OS generations, Microsoft strongly shifted toward "cloud" services, that culminate with 2012 wave products like SCVMM (Virtual Machine Manager).
Considering to deply "services" or "datacenters" instead of "simple" virtual machines, requires you to glue together OS, applications, data and lots of little things together. Here comes the need for a consistent shell language for all the products.
This way you can have the GUI to work like issuing command lines to an interpreter. This is very evident in some older products like SCVMM2010 and Exchange for example. Windows 2008 R2 had.NET framework integrated in "no-GUI" mode for this reason.
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Having no GUI, or an optional GUI, is a side effect of having a full scriptable configuration system. Since a couple of OS generations, Microsoft strongly shifted toward "cloud" services, that culminate with 2012 wave products like SCVMM (Virtual Machine Manager). Considering to deply "services" or "datacenters" instead of "simple" virtual machines, requires you to glue together OS, applications, data and lots of little things together. Here comes the need for a consistent shell language for all the products. This way you can have the GUI to work like issuing command lines to an interpreter. This is very evident in some older products like SCVMM2010 and Exchange for example. Windows 2008 R2 had .NET framework integrated in "no-GUI" mode for this reason.