That's exactly what's happening. You don't have to use this new stuff. If you want to continue doing things the traditional way, you can continue doing so.
> ...as new options to apt-get...
This isn't technically feasible IMHO, as somebody who has hacked on apt-get code. apt-get and dpkg work quite fundamentally differently, at package level. Snappy works on full system image level. It necessarily must be a separate thing.
> ...push the whole thing up to Debian so they can benefit too?
This might well be possible in the future, but it needs adoption at the system and image publication level, rather than just as features in a few Debian packages. It's a very fundamental paradigm shift. This is something that Ubuntu's development model excels at, and the sort of change that only happens in Debian at a glacial pace and with a team willing to put a huge effort behind it. But the code is Free Software and is already available; it would just need the political will and the integration effort. So while I'd like it to happen, I'm not sure that it will, just because of both the technical effort and politics involved. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, though.