Blender's method of accessing brushes for painting tasks has been updated and streamlined. Brushes store all paint-related settings, such as size, strength, tool type, textures and influence curve, and can be switched between in the brush list box or with shortcut keys. As well as the preset brushes included with Blender, you can also save your own, and assign your own shortcut keys to them.
Texture Paint and Vertex Paint modes now use a convenient embedded color wheel for quickly choosing paint colors.
Usage of brush textures has been updated as well, rather than previously having pre-defined 'texture slots' for each brush that must be filled in advance, brushes now have direct links to one texture each, that can be chosen and edited quickly with a searchable popup thumbnail selector.
As with many of Blender's UI elements, the brush selector can be customised (setting number of columns/rows) in the Python script files that define Blender's GUI.
Brushes can be named and saved, in a working scene file or in the default startup file. You can also set up custom shortcut keys to switch brushes (by their names), using the key map editor in User Preferences -> Input.
See this tutorial for more info.