Scott's right (per usual) - Aura has been this way all along.
Unlike Photoshop, which primarily concerns itself with single images, Aura is set up for either sequences or singletons. So it differentiates between Saving, a project specific action, and Exporting as imagery in standard file formats.
In Photoshop, when you Save As and select PSD filemode, you save the entire project in a form that preserves it's component layers. Select something like TIFF, TARGA or JPEG, you get only the single image, no layers.
Aura's Save/Save As menu point does the same thing as saving as a PSD (in fact you can load PSD's as Aura projects with layers intact) -- it Save's the whole project, in layers ... including all frames of any animated layers.
Export/Export Sequence is (are?) used to designate what sort of image output you want from a project -- still image, animations or image sequence. The export file format is designated by the current File>Mode selection.
So, Adobe treats an entire project just like any other file format, saving it when you 'Save As' a PSD. In Aura, Load as well as Save and Save As are exlusively used to deal with entire projects. Though you can directly load an image or anim using Load, doing so will open a new project. By contrast, Import and Import Sequence correspond to the Export menu points, and will load imagery into a new layer of an already existing project.
I hope this helps explain things a bit.
To be honest, I've been arguing for some time that this could be improved. I would prefer to use the more common arrangement where Save and Save As combined both the current Export and Save functions, offering variously to save a Project, an Image, or a Sequence, then offering direct selection of an appropriate file format.
