running cygwin bash within emacs

I've used cygwin on windows for a long time and I don't like the cygwin interface that much. So, I decided to run cygwin bash from within emacs. I put following(found here) in my emacs init file:

(defun cygwin-shell ()
  "Run cygwin bash in shell mode."
  (interactive)
  (let ((explicit-shell-file-name
          "C:/path/to/cygwin/bin/bash"))
    (call-interactively 'shell)))

Now, I can do "Meta-x cygwin-shell RET" to run bash inside emacs and get all the editing power of emacs :) .
PS: Don't forget to append "C:/path/to/cygwin/bin/" to PATH or else most of the commands like ls, grep etc would not work.