The short answer is that there is no difference. Just as you could mock out a call to S3API.get(object_id) and have it returns my_object, you could write a server that responds to the S3 API call for getting object_id.

The long answer is that using mocks is a lot quicker to develop, easier, more straight forward and has faster run time than maintaining a real runnable copy of S3 that behaves the exact same as the real S3. With the fake S3 you're still spending CPU cycles inside your S3 client while it talks HTTP with your fake S3, which slows unit tests down a lot. Plus fake S3 may have slightly different behavior when your S3API library interacts with it, which could lead to really hard to track down bugs later on. Trusting your APIs is what unit testing is all about.