First thing that comes to mind is having more control of which version of *BSD you want to be based on. With pfsense you're on whichever version of FreeBSD they

First thing that comes to mind is having more control of which version of *BSD you want to be based on. With pfsense you're on whichever version of FreeBSD they've worked up to. That said I roll pfsense on a thin mini-itx intel board and its great.