It definitely depends on what you're doing and how your interface is set up. If you're editing text in a non-monospace font at a non-super-high font size, and you want to insert between (say) two lowercase L characters, you need some fairly precision mousework, and that takes time.
And it will almost certainly always be easier to do actually complex operations via text (especially if you might be repeating them or slightly modifying them). Just yesterday I was generating a PDF packet with pdftk, and had a command line of the form "pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf blank.pdf file3.pdf cat output outfile.pdf" that I kept having to re-run (because I'd modified file2.pdf) or tweak (because I added file4.pdf). It's possible that the first pdftk would have been quicker in a GUI---though I'm not convinced---but in the aggregate there's no way a series of GUI ops would have been faster. And I'm not even sure how I'd accomplish something like "mv *.jpg jpg_subdir/" in something like Finder without a lot of manual finding and clicking and dragging and making mistakes.
And it will almost certainly always be easier to do actually complex operations via text (especially if you might be repeating them or slightly modifying them). Just yesterday I was generating a PDF packet with pdftk, and had a command line of the form "pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf blank.pdf file3.pdf cat output outfile.pdf" that I kept having to re-run (because I'd modified file2.pdf) or tweak (because I added file4.pdf). It's possible that the first pdftk would have been quicker in a GUI---though I'm not convinced---but in the aggregate there's no way a series of GUI ops would have been faster. And I'm not even sure how I'd accomplish something like "mv *.jpg jpg_subdir/" in something like Finder without a lot of manual finding and clicking and dragging and making mistakes.