Stretching my knowledge about those planes a bit, so it'll probably show, but I think the distinction I'm going for is not how the controls are activated (hydraulic vs electrical), but what role computers play in day-to-day flying. Boeing has long held that pilots are in charge, and as a result Boeing planes are pretty manual without a great deal of automation. Airbus has a differing philosophy, where the computer is fundamentally in control of the plane, and the pilots manipulating the controls are asking the computer to do something for them -- it decides if that request is valid for the flight mode and then acts to make it happen. One of the most well-known relatively recent failures of the Airbus system was the Air France flight, and IIRC a main cause was the computer switching to a mostly manual flight mode (due to a sensor failure) and the resulting change in how the flight controls work confused the copilot to the point that he stalled the plane.

In any case, that's what I was trying to get at. The game Boeing is playing with MCAS is a step in the direction that Airbus has a lot more experience with.