The verbosity is optional; most examples you see will be verbose in an effort to be more clear (i.e. Get-ChildItem vs 'gci') but when you have a little experience are typing with Powershell, you'll find the verbosity basically goes away, because you'll be familiar with using aliases and because you won't need abstruse tools and sublanguages (which are more verbose) to do filtering and processing:

  gci *.txt | %{ $tot += $_.length }; echo $tot

That's not more verbose than bash (one way of doing this):

  ls -l *.txt | awk '{ tot += $5 } END { print tot }'

So you'll see the pipeline written (in an example, for clarity), more like:

  Get-ChildItem *.txt | ForEach-Object { $tot += $_.length }; Write-Output $tot

But that's not how you'd usually use it; until/unless you're putting it in a script.

Note that 'ls -l' and guessing that you want to total up field 5 is brittle in way that the Powershell snippet isn't, but I'm leaving that issue aside.