There's a common fallacy that the technically minded are prone to, of assuming that since two different things are 'essentially' the same, the differences between them are superficial and unimportant.

So, for. example, since Scratch. and a text-based language with similar structures (Python, say), are 'essentially' the same, the graphical elements. of Scratch are just sugar, or fluff, and should be ignored.

It's the same mindset that says since anybody can get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem to version control it, there's no need for such a thing as DropBox.

Advice for the terminally reductionist-minded: Maybe the things that make Scratch different from Python are actually the most interesting thing about Scratch.