Better politics, internally and externally. Internally because the community isn't as hardcore. Externally because it hasn't been publicly associated with black markets the way Bitcoin has.
I'm not a fan of the DAO decisions, but reversing a prima facie fraudulent transaction is uncontroversial in banking.
Bigger than that is the tone with which the Bitcoin communicates. There's that prominent Bitcoin enthusiast who likes to cuss and scream and demonize perceived opponents on Twitter. There's another one (maybe the same guy?) who moderates with a vengeful bias on Reddit. That kind of shit-throwing is anathema to a large company.
> There's another one (maybe the same guy?) who moderates with a vengeful bias on Reddit. That kind of shit-throwing is anathema to a large company.
Also due to some being unhappy with the moderation of /r/bitcoin there's a separate community called /r/btc. Then again, there are many communities on Reddit that have split up due to disagreements about moderation, such as for example /r/meirl vs the previously vastly more popular /r/me_irl [1]. (The latter of these still has about 3x the amount of subscribers though, but /r/me_irl has grown to become large indeed.)
People like to compare the two but they are actually quite different. Bitcoin is supposed to be a store of value, Ethereum is a new decentralized web protocol. ETH is the gas used to power smart contracts on this protocol.
Your probably looking for some working examples of dApps (decentralized apps). Install MetaMask for Chrome and visit one of these sites: http://etheroll.com, http://etherdelta.github.io, and http://oasisdex.com are all working examples of smart contracts at work.
>I'm just learning but are there any real world examples of this yet?
Yes. The whitepaper lists many potential applications [0]. Some interesting ones today include issuing tokens for crowdsales ("ICO"s), gambling applications (FunFair), distributed computing (Golem), peer-to-peer payments and distributed apps (Status). There are many more that I am not familiar with.
>any idea what % of transactions utilize this today?
https://etherscan.io/accounts/c lists all smart contracts along with the amount of ETH they hold and the number of transactions that have called them. This doesn't completely answer your question, sorry.
the developer experience and tooling is easier the bitcoin I believe, it has an official javascript api for its blockchain, and also has a framework/language (Solidity) for creating financial applications on top of it
Actually there are languages outside of Solidity, lll (lisp like) is the most intriguing to me, and Serpent(python like), there is one more (which I am failing to recall).
