A couple of observations I hadn’t seen reported elsewhere…
When you start up in single-user mode, the screen has an initial low-res look very reminiscent of a PC starting up. After a few seconds, it switches to a higher-res ASCII screen indistinguishable from the PowerPC Macs when booting in single-user mode. A guess is that the initial part is actually EFI at work.
The boot selector that comes up when starting up with the Option key held down has had a visual makeover on the Intel Macs. No longer looking like the OS 9 throwback seen on PowerPC Macs, the next boot selector has high-res drive icons and a more OS X look.
Managing OS X 