The FreeBSD kernel is cool, but what really sells me on it is the concept of a 'core system' as a design feature, and the nifty things like ZFS that you get.
There's a new things that aren't quite like Linux, for instance, the 'watch' command does something entirely different.
sysutils/gnu-watch and sysutils/coreutils and other ports may be used to give you a more linux like environment. I have most of them installed, but I use them only when the native, BSD implementation lacks a certain option I need - and it's really rare.
And I support your opinion on a "core system" being a feature - it makes things consistent, which is a good thing. For example, I tried to setup a wifi network on Arch and I needed at least three different commands for this, each with it's own options syntax. In FreeBSD there is 'ifconfig' command which does everything related to networking and that's all.
The mouse-over popup spam was too much to fight with.