Sharepoint - whats the difference between team sites and a publishing sites?

Every SharePoint site is (on general) the same, where the only difference is what features are activated. A Publishing site have the site scoped Publishing infrastructure feature activated, and the web scoped SharePoint publishing feature activated. By this a library or list can make use of

• Major and minor versions (with history)
• Content approval
• Check out/check in functionality

You can activate both features mention above on a team site and make use of publishing features.

Publishing functionality is a set of two features, one at the Site Collection level and one at the Site level. You can activate them on any site like Team site, Document Center, Wiki site etc… You will find all the info on what publishing adds in that link, but here I want to showcase some reasons why I use Publishing for my clients.

The publishing site with workflow template is used similarly to the publishing site template to create sites designed to present web-based content. However, The publishing site with workflow template extends these capabilities by provisioning the resources need when content must be approved before it is made available to site users.once you create a site from this template you can configure the appropriate approval workflow to manage the content approval process.

The approval workflow is enabled by default only in the Publishing Site with Workflow site template. It can be used for content approval on a Web Site or an Intranet solution where the content must be reviewed before publication.

Note that the landing page of your team-site will be replaced by the standard publishing site, which will have the same look and feel as when you create a publishing site.

Usually we use Publishing site when we want to have a public facing site or an extranet that is exposed to the internet. And we use a Team site with Publishing enabled, when we want to keep things internal, but have more options for customizing you’re branding of your intranet.

Here is short details:

The Team site has the classic default list:

Announcement,Calendar,Links and Tasks

It also has plenty of document and page libraries. This kind of site is ready to work on for a team

Team site has a couple of text layouts, Publishing site have much more complex page layouts.

Simple moderation consists of the yellow bar, which gives us the page status (draft, checked out, approved, etc.). The Submit/Schedule buttons gives us the options to set the page as ready to be published where approvers can review the page before publishing it.

Reference link http://mosstechnet-kk.com/difference-between-team-site-and-publishing-site-sharepoint-or-publishing-feature-enabled-team-site/