One-Hot Vector representation vs Label Encoding for Categorical Variables
The main difference I can think of is that using one-hot encoding will mean that all your strings will be at the same (hamming) distance from each other, while using a scalar value means that distances between the resulting features will be meaningless (it may encode "red" as 1, "blue" as 2 and "green" as 3, but there is no reason why red is more similar to blue than to green).