The consumer cards don't use ECC and memory errors are a common issue (GDDR6 running at the edge of its capabilities). In a gaming situation that means a polygon might be wrong, a visual glitch occurs, a texture isn't rendered right -- things that just don't matter. For scientific purposes that same glitch could be catastrophic.
The "datacenter" cards offer significantly higher performance for some case (tensor cores, double precision), are designed for data center use, are much more scalable, etc. They also come with over double the memory (which is one of the primary limitations forcing scale outs).
Going with the consumer cards is one of those things that might be Pyrrhic. If funds are super low and you want to just get started, sure, but any implication that the only difference is a license is simply incorrect.