[vacri]

It's more of a swiss army knife. It's also still pretty new - the aws documentation misses out on some things for it (like autoscaling) and it's still in development to some degree, but it means you have to remember one command with one auth, instead of a handful (s3cmd, boto, others I can't recall)

[DrJ]

awscli depends on boto-core actually, so in some sense awscli is a fork of boto.