I’ll say the Digitone can make a wide range of percussive sounds. Really great kicks especially. It takes more time to finesse good percussive sounds out of it compared to the Machinedrum. I can just work so much faster with my MD to get awesome drum loops going. Though I have owned it longer, so I know my way around it.
Also consider you have only 4 tracks and 8 voices with the DN, so you might run into voice stealing with more complex loops. And if you want to use more than 4 types of sounds, you have to utilize sound locks from presets saved in the sound pool. All of these things take time to setup. MD has 16 voice / 16 tracks and can also have 16 lfos.
I do really enjoy the Digitone for percussive duties but mostly use it for Melodic / FX / Textures material. To ignore the Digitones melodic capabilities would be a disservice to yourself.
The two are hard to compare because they really are two different beasts. You do get conditional trigs and micro timing with the DN. And scale per track also. Those features alone sell it as a drum machine quite a bit. Harsh metallic sounds are in abundance on the DN, but the filters can easily tame those types of sounds and get you more into a clean digital sound. Using the Arpeggiator for hihats is pretty awesome though!