Um nmcli is plenty useful and has been for sometime. I use it+bash to bring up a randomly selected VPN endpoint at login. It's worked well for that and any other normal VPN stuff I need it to do for a while now.
It is nice to have curses interface for those that like that kind of thing. To me the biggest improvement will be the ability for it to get along with other methods of interface control like ip,config,etc.
NM is fine for non-server use cases. Looks like now it will be that much better.