of course I'm comparing it to an equally old version of GEM.
erm how about multitasking for starters ?
annoying 8.3 filename limitation ?
no ram disk ? etc ...
but one should also keep in mind that kickstart 1.3 takes 256 Kb space in ROM and wb 1.3 is loaded on top of it from floppy.
while GEM is totally loaded from a 192 ? kb ROM if I'm not mistaken.
so it's no wonder workbench is much more feature rich from TOS/GEM combination.