Not really. The basic entity of git is the commit and git checkout is meant to restore the working tree to the state when the commit has been created. It may act on the whole tree, a specific part and if no commit has been specified, it uses the index as the source. And with branches being just pointers to commits, it's quite easy to see where the range of options comes from.

Git has its model for version control and it's something that most tutorials don't explain. The CLI is giving you maximum control over this model. For daily operations, it's quite easy to wrap it in a much amenable interface.