The difference is that it's possible for new Etherium nodes to sync up using just the current state without having to trust the node they got it from or process the history, whereas new Bitcoin nodes have to either process the entire transaction history themselves or trust someone to give them a valid state copy. Also, pruned Bitcoin nodes are more analogous to Etherium nodes which only store the current state without any history (~1GB according to that link). I think the pruned nodes vbuterin talks about are roughly equivalent to unpruned Bitcoin nodes.