Assembly is actually the lowest form of programming
No its not. There is actually one lower, raw machine code (binary). At Uni we had to program a traffic light circuit using that to show we understood what was happening at the lowest level, its horrid.
"Assembly language" just replaces the raw machine code instructions with something more human readable eg pop, push, cmp, jne etc...
But you are right in the fact that for all intents and purposes they are the same thing :)