EASJ has several issues.
First of all, there is no guarantee that the deployment succeded after running EASJ. You will have to call ENUMSOLUTIONS and parse the XML returned to see if the deployment wen well.
Secondly, EASJ only checks for jobs in the SPAdministrationServiceJobDefinitionCollection of the current Web Front End server. This is probably what is causing you grief when you activate features: the job might be finished on current WFE, but not on all WFE. Another variation of this is that if you have deployed solutions earlier on WFE#1 and that job somehow was stalled, and you re-deploy the solution on WFE#2 you will get weird warnings about pending jobs etc. This is why it is important to always deploy from the same WFE!
STSADM extension guru and MVP Gary Lapointe has made an extension that should address the later problem, and hence be safe(r) to use in scripts:
http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2008/10/better-execadmsvcjobs-stsadm-command.html
AFAICS he doesnt address the fact that a deployment could occur during deployment though.
About the PowerShell solution: while it sounds attractive, it could become complex quite fast (we have created a deployment solution in PowerShell and trust me it was no picknick). Also alot of the logic regarding deployment are internal classes (such as SPTimerStore). It is definately doable, though :-)