With the plethora of possibilities for most command-line tools, I would be surprised to learn that there is no way to colorize the info that apt-get, apt-cache, and related tools return. Even so, Googling was fruitless in this.
Primarily, it would be nice to have the summary lines that show total count/size, and color-code each type of action count: eg, upgrades in blue, installs in green, held in yellow, and removed in red.