Nice indeed
Shorter and a tiny bit faster than !.echo -q (although the difference is really really small, almost immeasurable. The identifier call overhead seems to almost match up with the one of the extra command). Definitely gonna use it.
$() is weird, you can find other little oddities if you play with it. So far the only one I'm probably going to use is $(,stuff) which is the same as $(stuff,2) , only a tiny bit faster. Oh and I believe you know about $(stuff,) already (which is the same as $(stuff,0)).