A couple more thoughts. Leadership is big, but there are a few other differences to be aware of. If you compare creature statistics between King's Bounty and HOMM V, you'll find that HOMM V creatures are designed with much higher damage potentials versus hitpoints. In KB, you'll have units with 50-80 hitpoints doing 5-10 damage (roughly), whereas in HOMM V units with the same hp range are doing 15-20 damage. Even the top tier units have 200-300 hp, but are doing 40-50 hitpoints. Compare that to KB top tier units, with 600-800 hp, maybe 3-4 times as much, but doing about twice as much damage. This means units die a lot faster in HOMM V. Even Attack and Defense give 5% bonuses rather than 3.3% in KB.
Also, I like the hero leveling system in KB more. Talent runes and skill trees are great, despite whatever skills may or may not be balanced. In HOMM V, just figuring out how to pick skills, abilities and perks (yes, they have three names for practically the same thing) can be a complicated mess. There are so many crazy rules and dependencies that it makes it difficult to plan and for me requires a skill wheel just to make sense of it (very well done, by the way, thanks to the HOMM V community). Furthermore, the choices are random, which can make it impossible to build a hero the way you want, and sometimes you can get offered two poor choices where choosing either one completely rules out other skills that you want. I like that in KB there is some randomness, in getting choices for Attack, Defense, Mana, Rage, etc, but it's a much smaller impact and not a big deal if you don't get what you want, and you can direct the growth of your hero's talents, which has a bigger impact in my opinion, whereas in HOMM V poor random choices can completely screw up your plan. Also, some skills in HOMM V are almost entirely useless, i.e. I think there's more imbalance in HOMM V between good/bad skills.
Sorry to rain on HOMM V so much. It really is a fun game that I like, and I've been a fan since HOMM 1 (or even since the original KB, if you count that). There are many things to like about HOMM V, but I think there are some major game design problems, which KB does a great job of addressing, and which make KB a superior game overall.
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