The biggest difference is language - we don't have to think about addresses and ports being different ideas. Our APIs and textbooks get simpler. And from an ad

The biggest difference is language - we don't have to think about addresses and ports being different ideas. Our APIs and textbooks get simpler. And from an address perspective, its better because we end up with much more flexibility around how our networks are designed. Want to use 1 public IP address with 10k web servers? Now you can! Want a single machine to handle 10M outgoing socket connections? Sure - just allocate more addresses from your pool. You can already do some of this stuff right now, but its awkward to reason about because of how ports and addresses interrelate. It'd be simpler and easier if we just think of the (address,port) tuple as a single address entity.