I wonder if Steve needs to move to marketing? He's done an awesome job here of highlighting one massive difference between GPlus and Facebook - that you can really publish publicly to the whole world, the way the web was intended.
Notes have been around for 5+ years and I've never seen them linked as news stories. In contrast, I've seen Google+ updates consistently submitted as news to HN and other sources. There is a significant difference between Google+ updates and Facebook Notes and it's worth thinking about why. I suspect it has to do with the fact that status updates and public posting in Google+ are the same interface. For Facebook, status updates are character limited and you have to click into the Notes tab in order to write something longer.
While I agree those differences are important I think culture also plays a large role.
Facebook started primarily as a website for college students to share privately with their friends.
Google Plus started by emphasizing that you can choose who you want to share with (including the public) and shipped with a "subscribe-like" feature that allowed technical people to add many of the same tech celebrities that they were following on Twitter. Since it takes awhile to convert one's friends to a new service, for many tech people, reading public posts by these other tech people became the prominent way they use the service.
You can mostly do the same things on each site (albeit at different levels of convenience), but their beginnings help shape how people think about and use the sites.
