Combat in FFX is stale and underwhelming with no sense of urgency. I fell asleep in boss battles from boredom. Sphere grid is a decent progression system but I've always been a sucker for job systems, like FFX-2 had. Gameplay is less linear with multiple endings possible, making for a lot more replay value.
That said, I simply said FFX-2's "everything else" was awesome, i never compared it to FFX' everything else, because that really doesn't matter for my enjoyment of this particular game. But since you brought that up, no, I disagree.