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* A far richer and (generally) more deeply adhered-to object model.

* The use of CORBA makes it more network-capable, more flexible, more
distributable, and probably more scalable in the long run. (what is bloat
now will probably be seen later to be essential infrastructure :)

* Cross-platform. KDE should work on any Unix/X you can compile it for,
but GNOME should one day work on Mac, Windows, framebuffer, etc.
Gtk, to a fair extent, already does (cf Mozilla) - but then, so does Qt.

* A better-defined and more extensible interface to the window-manager -
it would be difficult to make another window-manager play the tricks that
KWM does (though nothing stops you from using them), but there is a fairly
good written guide as to how to integrate your WM with GNOME, and about 3
window-managers with varying degrees of support.

* Superior underlying widget/other libraries. Gtk has been heralded by
many as one of the best-designed libraries around - very easy and powerful
to the programmer, very adaptable and modular, and best of all, virtually
language-agnostic. While Qt has each of these qualities to a degree, Gtk
has been (re-)designed from the ground up in order to achieve these them.

Bearing in mind that I speak only from my readings of specs, docs,
manifestos, reviews, etc. and haven't read more than a hundred or so lines
of code (and all of those in Gtk, not GNOME proper nor KDE) I hope that
this is a reasonable summing-up of the advantages of each, without
descending to the ever-present topic of licensing issues.
On the other hand, I'd dearly like someone to expound on the more
technical side/advantages of KDE, since I feel I am a little behind on
that side of things, and some of what I said above may well have been
addressed.
KDE seems to have been more focused on infrastructure recently (perhaps in
the wake of the licensing change red herring) so a lot may have developed.
GNOME development, otoh, seems to have gravitated towards the usability
and applications side of things, now that the fundamentals are now mostly
complete.
It would be a shame if the two couldn't find a way to let the strengths of
each help the other.

-Greg Mildenhall