The usage is essentially the same, just a different command. Huge benefit though is that if you have Python 3.4+ installed you already have the virtual env and pip installed, so things are much simpler.
I'm not sure what the differences are to old virtualenv, but the biggest feature is that it works out of the box as long as you have Python > 3.4. No more googling "how to install virtualenv" or "easy_install pip; pip install virtualenv" stuff.
Unless you're on Ubuntu, where they ship a non-functional version of venv and require you to "sudo apt install" python-venv to get the working version, defeating the entire point of a simple module in the stdlib that lets you manage your Python environment as a user.
The big improvement on 16.04 is at least the error message explains what's going on.