hmmm, well I guess I'll take a stab. Everybody please feel free to chime in if I make an error.
When used w/ AD, "Network Neighborhood / My Network Places" gets a new icon when you drill down into "Entire Network" -- you normally get "Microsoft Windows Network" which contains all the workgroups, and with AD you get a new icon called "Directory" which is a breakdown of the AD controllers, containers, shares, and more. Extremely heirarchal, which makes things nice. Also, when adding printers, mapping shares, modifying permissions etc, you get to use the Active Directory search tool instead of just browsing through the list -- it's a little bit of a pain if you're used to just scrolling through a list (that option is still there), but searching through thousands of users is a lot quicker than scrolling.
NetBEUI is a protocol that has been deprecated in favor of TCP/IP on modern 2k/2k3 installations. Don't use it if you can; I've never ran an AD domain on NetBEUI but I guess it could be done? I do know that on winxp & win2k3 server NetBEUI is not installed by default, but is instead a protocol that you have to manually install.
If your machine is in an AD domain, there is no longer a Master Browser, as the AD controllers take that over and handle it via DNS/WINS. Also, all file permissions, user/group management all become centralized onto the AD controller, giving rise to cool stuff like containers, group policy objects, and a lot more.
WINS (Windows Internet Name Service) is generally only utilized for internal NetBIOS name resolution. WINS is almost always the culprit when you can't find a box on your LAN, same goes for when browsing the network neighborhood is extremely slow. NetBIOS itself has been deprecated in favor of SMB (Server Message Block). NetBIOS generally runs on TCP ports 135-139, while SMB utilizes only TCP/445. In Microsoft-centric environments almost everything goes over 445, as SMB is very flexible and carries all kinds of traffic -- file & printer sharing, authentication, named pipes, mail (exchange) and more.
In an AD domain, WINS is utilized only for older clients (pre-2000) as everything else is (normally) handled via Dynamic DNS on the AD controllers. A standard AD server does not include a WINS server; it has to be installed. As soon as your client machine logs onto the domain, DNS (usually) is updated with information about the client (both the server AND the user); this happens again with any DHCP leases/renewals, as well as periodically during normal communication with the server. DNS is incredibly more reliable than WINS (imo) and is far, far superior management wise; getting WINS-utilizing machines off your network should be a priority. WINS + NetBIOS = suck.
In short, Microsoft has an incredible product in Active Directory. I'm a pretty pro-Unix sort of guy, but AD makes administration of large scale enterprises ridiculously easy while eliminating a lot of the cruft that surrounded the winNT & 95/98/ME product lines.
btw, this isn't really a 'networking' question, but more of a systems administration/software question.
