copy (cp) works with binary files. type or cat is designed to work with text files.

Note that on *NIX/POSIX, there is generally no distinction between "binary" and "text" files. cp doesn't concatenate multiple files (-T, from your reply below, makes no difference here) - cat is "the" *NIX tool for concatenating files. If I guess that by "binary" vs. "text" you maybe mean "block-by-block" instead of "line-by-line", then that is course a valid point in regards to performance. But at least GNU Coreutils' cat is optimized to read and write files block-by-block, not line-by-line, when it doesn't need to do any line-by-line processing - see its simple_cat function.