What's the difference between AES and earlier block ciphers? Is there any difference except speed and key and block size from user's point of view?

Or does AES have something that ideal block cipher doesn't have?
From a user's point of view, AES improves on DES and 3DES in at least two important aspects beyond speed and key length:


AES is a 128-bit block cipher, which makes it more secure for huge volume of data than a 64-bit block cipher is. For example, any 64-bit block cipher in CBC mode is vulnerable to a simple distinguisher attack: the adversary has a chance to recognize plaintext with all identical blocks (e.g. unused portion of a file), because the corresponding ciphertext is more unlikely to contain collisions than it is for random plaintext. That makes 3DES-CBC quite practically unsafe for 32 GiB enciphered; for 8 MiB enciphered, the advantage is already like $2^{-25}$ (fixed).
AES does not have the complementation property of DES (and 3DES), which is that $\forall K, \forall X, \overline{\operatorname{DES}(K,X)}= \operatorname{DES}(\overline K,\overline X)$; that property, while occasionally useful, is undesirable in some protocols, and from a theoretical standpoint makes DES and 3DES trivially distinguishable from a random encryption oracle.