With the Thematic framework, you install the Thematic theme and also a child theme. Then you only activate and customize the child theme, which will override styles and functions in the parent theme. When new versions of Thematic come out, you can update the parent theme without affecting your child theme.
There’s a lot more to Thematic. It has a lot of folders, files, functions and the pages use a lot of action hooks and filters for extending the theme’s functionality. I would say this is an advanced theme framework, aimed at developers that want to customize the code in their themes. You and I would really need to read the documentation in order to learn this framework.
More info here:
Guide – http://themeshaper.com/thematic/guide
Forums – http://themeshaper.com/forums
The Whiteboard theme seems to be more of a boilerplate, using clean html5 and including some nice features to use as a base for customizing. The thing I liked about it is the resolution specific styles, that adjust the appearance for different screen sizes.
