Better integrity checks, mostly. Built in checksums of files, stricter limits on what you can do as a package ( no controlling terminal and so on ) whereas in deb it's "optional" and "flexible" (aka. not built in and maybe people will get together and decide something)

rpm has some build time analysing tools to track library (.so, python, perl, php, ruby imports) use and annotate this as dependencies.

This above feature is one that causes the mess when you don't have the full dependency graph for a package, because rpm by itself does no dependency resolution.