Well, when I upgraded to OS X Lion the installer failed because of a problem with the BOOT.INI file on my Windows partition. Imagine my surprise at seeing "BOOT.INI" in the Mac OS X installer logs. For a split second I thought that OS X was just a shell on top of MS-DOS.
I could be pithy and answer "No", but in my maintenance of Windows in various contexts I rely on that shim of DOS emulation, Start -> Run -> cmd.<p>I feel like I get much of the quick info (e.g. ipconfig, net) I need here faster than I would get it from Control Panel -> Network (something) -> (forget the next bit).<p>Does Windows still rely on DOS? No. Do I? Sure.
If I were explaining this to someone who didn't want a long story, I would actually say that newer versions of Windows don't rely, at their core, on an implementation of DOS; instead, they rely on an implementation of VMS. :)<p>The long story: <a href="http://everything2.com/title/The+similarities+between+VMS+and+Windows+NT" rel="nofollow">http://everything2.com/title/The+similarities+between+VMS+an...</a>
Windows may no longer have DOS <i>code</i> in it, but it certainly has DOS characteristics and limitations in it. Most significantly: drive letters, backslash path separators, and 260 char file name limits. Also the pathetic batch file system. There are a few other limitations that come from DOS days.