Texture binding in GL is utterly insane. The D3D model, as I understand it is really straightforward - textures are basically pointers to some information on an image buffer, and you can store a texture directly into a texture uniform. So to 'bind' a texture in D3D you just store it directly into the sampler. I forget whether sampling options like filtering mode are part of that, or part of a separate structure - either way, in GL sampling is part of the texture, while in D3D it is separately configurable which is a GODSEND.

IIRC in modern versions of D3D (10+? 11+?) they've expanded on this and just have the general concepts of views and buffers, so that you can treat textures and vertex buffers as if they share underlying properties, and shader code can manipulate them in similar ways. This is great for compute and GPU-accelerated processing and GPU feedback.