Where do you see that @transaction.atomic is deprecated? It's not in the release notes[1] and if I recall correctly, was only introduced in 1.6 as a means to come up with a consistent API for nested transactions and savepoints. Are you implying that it's deprecated as a decorator? Even if that's the case, I still can't find a source.

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.7/