The whole problem with streaming is that you don't really own anything, you just rent it and you never know if what you like will still be available tomorrow or not, not to mention changes in mixes without any warnings. As for Roon there is Audirvana that costs fraction of it and unless you have a very complex multiroom setup I do not really see any advantage of Roon but YMMV.
Coming back to CD transports. Music is about magic and there is something magical at least to some of us in silver (or gold for that matter) disc spinning. Just sit and relax. No setup fiddling, no upgrades, no missing tracks, no breaking wifi connections, no flimsy mobile apps etc. also adds to the complete feeling. Secondly if you like to play with upsampling (please note that I am not trying to transplant the discussion from M Scaler thread here) the only setup that worked flawlessly out of the box for me was my cd transport. All software solutions always had some issues with my dacs.
Last but not least I've been able to read coupe of unreadable for different cd players/transports CDs using 20USD external dvd drive but my current cd transport is able to read those disc too.
So coming back to main topic question: are they all the same? Not in my book. My 20USD external dvd drive while working alright provides a lot of noise and has not remote, I need to turn on a computer to use it. On the other hand my CD transport is almost dead silent, does only need external dac, has a remote and provides upsampling options that can be easily disabled. Even the remotes are different and can make a difference since not all provides track number selection feature for example. So in the end the answers is: no, not all are created equal. Even assuming they all sound the same there are still important differences between them.