Nielsen on Generic Commands

I ran across this interesting bit from Jakob Nielsen's UseIt site about user interface design. It's about using the same few commands in a UI and is an interesting twin to the 'uniform interface' aspect of REST. Although a 'user interface' and a 'network interface' are very different beasts I can't help but wonder if there's some fundamental reason for the similarity.

Summary: Applications can give users access to a richer feature set by using the same few commands to achieve many related functions.

In application design, there's a tension between power and simplicity: Users want the ability to get a lot done, but they don't want to take the time to learn lots of complicated features.