The automatic failover is very important different. Beside that there are other differences. Log shipping is always asynchrony. Mirroring can be synchrony or asynchrony. You can do log shipping to multiply sites. You can do mirroring to one site only. Depending on the way that you configured the log shipping, you might be able to work with the target database and issue select statements on it for reports. You can not work with the secondary database in mirroring. Mirroring is supported only from SQL Server 2005. Log shipping was supported on much earlier versions (I think that it was introduced with SQL Server 6.5, but I’m not sure).

Adi