On the NES, one of the dreaded things to work with is the attribute table, which is a separate 64-byte structure tacked onto the end of a tilemap which indicates what parts of the background are what palette in an awkward zig-zaggy fashion.

And on the SNES it's just, nonexistent. The tilemap is just a series of 16-bit values that contain a palette number, tile number, and flips, and it's just nice and linear. That's one nice thing about the console.