Since RH7-ish, Red Hat has had 'up2date', a wrapper around rpm in a similar vein to apt-get being a wrapper around dpkg. yum came from Yellow Dog Linux, a PPC fork of Red Hat, and when it became better/more popular and RH made RHN a paying customers only thing, yum was imported into Fedora and up2date does its updates off yum servers.
Or more correctly up2date's "back-end" was modularised. For RHEL it still uses XML-RPC etc to talk to RHN. For those with FC it can use yum, apt, (or something else you invent, it is written in python after all). I would imagine it wouldn't be hard to add a Red-Carpet back-end to up2date. Personally on FC I prefer to use apt but only because you can use Synaptic and a lot of repositories prefer to go the apt way rather than yum.
We had huge problems with FC1 at last years installfest, in that yum downloaded a single .hdr file for each package in the respository. While very small, each file was overhead and the process was tedious. yum 2.2 addresses this by having a single packages archive file which you download, similar to Debian's Packages.gz file.
That was indeed a nice upgrade to yum. For those who don't like to compete you can always give Smart a go. it is a "grand unification project" for package management. It can install rpm, deb, Slackware tgz, and has a nice GUI. Or so I hear. I've not used it. :) Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com