How to count objects in PowerShell?

Question

As I\'m reading in the PowerShell user guide, one of the core PowerShell concepts is that commands accept and return objects instead of text. So for example, runnin

Answer 1

@($output).Count does not always produce correct results. I used the ($output | Measure).Count method.

I found this with VMware Get-VmQuestion cmdlet:

$output = Get-VmQuestion -VM vm1
@($output).Count

The answer it gave is one, whereas

$output

produced no output (the correct answer was 0 as produced with the Measure method).

This only seemed to be the case with 0 and 1. Anything above 1 was correct with limited testing.