I was actually talking about RHEL 7, which uses systemd. When you type "service foo restart", it redirects to "systemctl restart foo.service" and prints a message saying so. It's a nice way to nudge people to use the new command without being obtuse, redundant, or confusing.
Well said. I'd add that "service" is actually doubly confusing because the command was IIRC actually introduced by Ubuntu when they were doing Upstart, which was their own attempt an an init replacement. Ubuntu still has the service command, actually, and now it supposedly runs both init scripts and systemd units. I've never actually tried it because I'm rather spooked by having multiple mechanisms to activate a service. It still mostly has the upstart command syntax from what I can recall.
My Ubuntu server actually has a Upstart service file from one of the daemons I have installed, I only hope it's not somehow being activated or translated into an init script by some compatibility system Ubuntu has built in.
You might even be talking about RHEL 6, in which they used Upstart, and not whatever they're doing now. RHEL 6 is still under extended support, which means that there are still quite a lot of Upstart systems out there.