Of course there's a difference between commanding roll rate directly and controlling ailerons directly, but of those Airbus pilots without an axe to grind who have controlled the thing in Normal, Alternate and Direct, the vast majority state that the difference is not that pronounced, and very easy to get used to - I think someone a long time ago compared it to losing power steering in a car, the only difference being that it was slightly more sensitive as opposed to more heavy
That kind of comment / comparison only underlines the lack of understanding of the difference between commanding
roll rate and commanding
deflection. On a car the failure of power steering doesn't affect at all wheel deflection per number of steering wheel turns.
If you wanted an actual comparison you'd have a car where your steering wheel would not be connected at all to the steering rack, and the "steering assist" would modulate your steering inputs according to speed. If it were to fail, probably 99% of the time it wouldn't make a difference and you wouldn't notice - except if you were to say drive on the autobahn at 250km/h and fail to adjust your steering wheel deflection to your speed and gallantly drive off the road into the side barrier thinking "what the hell just happened".