Compared to the U.S., where I am originally from, I couldn't pay any amount of money to get what I have here.
Your commute time will rage from 55min to 1h15min.
Party scene in Berlin is great, but Zürich is more about house parties with friends. Live music was a hair better in Berlin, but we still get interesting acts here.
The nature and outdoor activities rival Berlin any day. The water is clean, warm, and smells nice. Plenty of hills for mountain biking and running, etc. Public transit just works. I could count Zugausfälle on a single hand here; whereas I would have needed a whole accountant book to have inventoried Berlin's and DB.
There is a lot of weird stuff here, too, art- and culture-wise. When H.R. Giger (art designer for Alien) died, I went to his funeral service at the Peterskirche. Brought a strange collection of people out of the woodwork: Swiss Hells Angels (ha!) and a bunch of other freaks. People here small talk a bunch here out in public, so I've gotten to meet a bunch of random folks more informally than I have elsewhere.
If you like craft or international beer or cocktails, Zürich probably beats Berlin. The market is more globalized here, so you can find beer from anywhere in the world (pedestrian German beer is still better than in CH, though the microbreweries here are outstanding). That was a challenge in Berlin: only one or two places to find Belgian beer. A good cocktail in Berlin cost € 18 (my benchmark was an unlabeled speakeasy near Rosenthaler Platz whose name I forget; it was the only proper cocktail bar I found in months of searching/trial), which is a lot of cash on a Berlin salary. A similar quality cocktail in Zürich costs the same, but that is cheap on local salary.
As a parent (not one who sequesters himself and child like so many others do — at least in the U.S.), the day-to-day here is priceless and frictionless. So many fun things to do with a little one. In Berlin, I would constantly worry about broken glass on the sidewalks, which isn't a problem here. Try keeping an eye to ensure the little one doesn't fall into it; it's a challenge.
Street food was better in Berlin, to be sure, but sit-down restaurants between both cities are a toss-up. The Indian is certainly better in Zürich, and the same can be said for the Vietnamese. Fewer of the foreign restaurants here do the whole Pan-Asian do-everything-but-nothing-well than in Berlin. The slow food festival as well as some of the pop up restaurants are a nice addition to the scene — actually really nice. We (slow food group) did a large potluck at an old slaughter house by Letzigrund a year back. Someone caught a monster of a fish from Lake Zürich and smoked it there on premise: some two meter long thing that was wider than my torso.
I don't know. Both are great. I keep very busy and don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.