Is there any real benefit over IPython + SymPy?
Sage is many things intelligently integrated, of which SymPy is just one example. Superficially Sage is a set of command-line and web user interfaces with a preprocessor on top of the Python programming language. The deeper part of Sage is a set of libraries that tie together many high-quality tried-and-true open-source packages by providing a unified API and object model (theoretically based in category theory, I think), plus a set of package-specific APIs for when those are more desirable. The packages include Maxima as the main tool for symbolic computation, SymPy as another, NetworkX for graph-theoretic operations, PARI/GP for number theory, and many more: http://www.sagemath.org/links-components.html