In Oracle, client tools are painful. You need to buy TOAD for a GUI, and has some good features (CTRL-Clkick to get table info) but it's basically a dogs breakfast.

Back end of Oracle is very configurable and tunable (i.e. you can configure page size) and 'open' but also very complicated, and you need to know a lot of stuff to be able to make a simple change. It suffers from having to maintain a lot of backwards compatability.

Lately I have noticed the Oracle introduces new features (i.e. windowing functions). Messes them up a bit, has to wear the pain to get them right. Then when they've settled down, MS learns from their mistakes and get's it mostly right first time, 18 months later. I'm happy with that because the MS product stays a little cleaner.

SQL is also starting to collect backwards compatability baggage now though.

But compare moving a database file in Oracle with moving a database file in SQL. Oracle is incredibly manual and error prone. SQL gives you a GUI and you don't really need to know all about the guts of it to move a database file.