Akamai is balls deep in video streaming, which is probably the most bandwidth/traffic intense thing for a CDN to dabble with. My guess is that CF has much more diverse traffic. Hence the fallout from an interruption would be quite different.
Not quite, Akamai is more large corp centric (they don't serve average Joe) besides that they do also security. If it went down you would get all of sudden e.g. a lot of DDOS possible.