Yes but apt-get isn't a seperate package from apt, just a seperate command. All of the apt-* commands are part of the same package, which is now Apt-3.0. This isn't really what the user above you was asking.
All well and good, but that doesn't cover "better". Does this mean apt-get et. al. were improved, or just apt? Where's the documentation for this "improvement"?
I honestly don't understand why use apt anywhere. Why don't always use apt-get so everything's consistent and you don't have to keep two apis for the same job on your head?
We really need a user friendly way to show packages that are really manually installed by the user (some automatically installed package are marked as manually installed, see the answers to this question).
even nix interface is known as being kinda bad but you still have a easy way to do this.