I feel it would be more natural if one build step was generated for each paragraph of command declared in the literate definition.

For instance

mvn clean verify
echo Hello world

would generate a single build step

However,

Building the project

mvn clean verify

Printing a nice helloworld

echo Hello world

should generate two build steps.

That would definitely help to deal with batch constraints necessity of wrapping batch calls with 'call' (taking https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Literate+Plugin as example)