The addition of make_unique finally means we can tell people to 'never' use new rather than the previous rule to "'never' use new except when you make a unique_ptr".
There's also a third reason:
make_unique does not require redundant type usage. unique_ptr<T>(new T()) -> make_unique<T>()
None of the reasons involve improving runtime efficiency the way using make_shared does (due to avoiding a second allocation, at the cost of potentially higher peak memory usage).
* It is expected that C++17 will include a rule change that means that this is no longer unsafe. See C++ committee papers P0400R0 and P0145R3.