Salesforce DX aims to transform Salesforce development by empowering developers, admins, and ISVs. It introduces features like scratch orgs for development, source tracking to sync code/metadata between orgs and version control, and continuous integration/delivery capabilities. The Salesforce CLI is central to the new development flow, allowing interaction with scratch orgs and integration with third party tools. This enables improved productivity through an agile development model based on open source principles and standards.