Magento has one command-line interface that performs both installation and configuration tasks: <your Magento install dir>/bin/magento. The new interface performs multiple tasks, including:

• Installing Magento (and related tasks such as creating or updating the database schema, creating the deployment configuration, and so on)
• Clearing the cache
• Managing indexes, including reindexing
• Creating translation dictionaries and translation packages
• Generating non-existent classes such as factories and interceptors for plug-ins, generating the dependency injection configuration for the object manager.
• Deploying static view files
• Creating CSS from LESS

Other benefits:

• A single command (php <your Magento install dir>/bin/magento list) lists all available installation and configuration commands
• Consistent user interface based on Symfony
• The CLI is extensible so third party developers can "plug in" to it
  This has the additional benefit of eliminating users' learning curve
• Commands for disabled modules do not display.