There is one practical difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum that i like to think about - Ethereum is actually creating a platform. In theory Bitcoin is capable of that too, but in practice the core community is quite religious about keeping it as money. Meanwhile Ethereum is creating more surfaces of research and engineering (e.g. token standard, identity standard, swarm network).

It's interesting to compare to all the altcoins that were created after bitcoin to OS era in around 80s and early 90s. Now we are closer to Web era. It's not that the research in OS's is no longer there. It's just that the next abstraction layer is an enabler for simply more people.