I discovered wajig for Debian, and it's great. wajig is a simplified system management tool (especially for package management). It provides a nice frontend to apt-get, dpkg, apt-cache etc, and it's lovely.

It has all the niceties that apt-get has in terms of bash autocompletion (assuming you have advanced bash completion turned on), so bash can complete both the 'verbs' and 'nouns'. It also does sudo automatically, so now it's just:

wajig install foo

...rather than:

sudo apt-get install foo

It has some nice shortcuts like wajig daily-upgrade, and wajig stop|start|restart|reload foo for services, and has wrapped all the commonly used apt/dpkg commands into easy to read ones – no more "was it -l or -L?". The only problem I anticipate is that I won't be able to work without it. The advanced tab completion in bash (combined with autocompletion in various IDEs I use) is fast becoming a problem that way too – I'm at the stage where I hit the tab key while writing normal prose, and get annoyed that the 'read-my-mind-now' key seems to have stopped working.