I don’t get this comment. Gnome is not trying to make a walled garden, and Microsoft has taken every chance they get at making walled gardens (Windows phone, windows 8 arm, various proprietary file formats and protocols), they just haven’t been very successful at it.
Original grep was pretty much a wrapper around sed (or actually maybe ed, I don’t remember). That’s why it’s called g/re/p, which is the sed command to do the same thing.