The biggest problem with Python is there's always some divide between it's environment and shell. I don't think Perl had this problem as accessing the shell was built into the language.

There needs to be a modern language that looks friendly, is compatible with shell, and is apart of the shells environment.

I am one of many people who don't really care for shell, it's old, limited, and just plain ugly. Unfortunately it's still the best way to interact with Unix, so it should be built upon to keep compatibility.

Wouldn't it be nice to write shell scripts with objects and data structures?

So long as your shell language isn't object-oriented. We don't want PowerShell on UNIX.