I really like the idea of a pinning service for domains that uses provider lists, where you can subscribe to ICANN and root name servers but then override or add your own domains and TLDs.
When reading about GNS for the first time, that was really the killer feature for me. How many times have i failed to resolve domains that were either censored, seized or simply forgotten to renew?! With GNS, as long as the public key lives in my zone i'd be very confident i can resolve thepiratebay.org or wikileaks.org no matter what some government has to say about it.
It's different because it's not subject to IP spoofing, and does not require to run specific infra to setup a zone. Your zones live in the DHT not on a nameserver of yours, so even your less-technical friends given the right software UX could publish their favorite domain names in their zones for them to be forever resolvable, or as shortcuts.
Like maybe there's this super cool blog about guitars my friend akhmad follows but i can't remember the URL right now and of course Google is giving me the worst SEO-induced results. But i know my friend akhmad published it as "guitar" in his zone because he also forgets the name every now and then, so now i can just go to "guitar.akhmad" in my browser (assuming i already have akhmad in my hyper-hyper local root).
Yes this does have some consequences for some things such as TLS validation, but if you want we could get into the details of why that's OK (TLDR: CAs are only good because DNS is bad security for key distribution, DANE over GNS would be arguably more secure).
