I don’t know anything about Arch. Ubuntu, as usual, probably got it straight from Debian. Upstream code is here: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/sysvinit

According to `pacman -Fys service`, Arch does not ship the service(8) forwarder script, so you can only use systemctl(8). I've seen service(8) on at least RHEL and SLES, though.

However, emulating it should be as easy as

  $ cat >> ~/.bashrc
  service() { systemctl $2 $1 }