As a ZX Spectrum user I was always jealous of the C64 colour palette. It had a single colour per pixel vs the ZX Spectrum's 1 colour per 8x8 pixel.
It did, however, also have sprites, which could float over or under the main screen.
(If you're willing to dedicate pretty much all of the CPU time to flipping stuff around while the video chip is rendering the screen, you can have finer-grained color selections on the c64, but that's mostly the domain of demos.)