Unicode support. It might have been the Windows ports of grep that were the problem, but ripgrep shines with Unicode files. And it handles a mix of Unicode and ASCII files without issue.

And I totally agree that having grep installed everywhere and it's pretty fast enough. But I had a few ripgrep searches that were genuinely eyeblink fast. Like my finger hadn't fully lifted off the enter key and it was done. On 10K+ plus files, about 1 GB, with 1.5M+ LOC. And the default folder recursion and .gitignore handling is a plus.