You might know that StAX (JSR 173) and the System.Xml.XmlReader/Writer classes are quite similar, at the very least in scope. A very interesting difference (that gave me a lot of grief in porting/implementing these APIs) is the way namespace attributes are being treated.
In StAX, namespace attributes are typically dealt with through different calls than those used for ‘normal’ attributes. This special treatment also comes with a table, where defined namespaces can be stored and referenced. In .NET, a namespace attribute is just another attribute, but they also have an XML namespace table, managing prefixes and scope.
While the differences are only significant on layer 8 and 9 of the ISO stack (politics and religion), porting from one to the other API is quite interesting and – at times – forces you to think about the infoset in new ways.