Eject / safely remove vs umount

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04, and when I rigth click on a my flash drive icon (in the Unity left bar) I get two options that have me confused: **eject** and **safely remove**.
The closer I came to an answer was this forum thread , which concludes that (for a flash drive) they are both equal and also equivalent to use the umount command. However, this last assertion seems to be false.
If I use umount from the console to unmount my flash dive, and then I use the command lsblk, I still see my device (with nothing under MOUNTPOINT, of course). On the other hand, if I **eject** or **safely remove** my flash drive, lsblk does not list it anymore.

So, my question is, what would be the console command/commands that would really reproduce the behaviour of **eject** and **safely remove**?