Not quite the shootout between the two that the title suggests but more my observations having just bought a TD-17 after owning a DTX6 for three years (I moved to a different country for my job and sold all my old gear to local musicians as with a 100% import tax in Pakistan they can't get hold of much).
Initial impression is that from a tactile perspective the Roland is hard where the Yamaha is squishy. The best example of this is the bass drum pad. The Yamaha is multi-chambered, the idea being that the harder you hit it the bigger the drum feels. In practice this means it's very pliable and feels like a low tuned head. The Roland on the other hand feels like a block of wood by comparison. With the Yamaha it actually slowed me down compared to the real thing whereas the Roland has too much, hard, rebound and I can go quicker.
To a lesser degree the same can be said for the silicone Yamaha heads compared to mesh. Detuning the mesh helps a bit but the rebound on them is still more, with the silicone heads feeling more like medium tuned heads and the mesh more like high tuned but with that unmistakable rebound only mesh has. Overall though not unpleasant but I do slightly prefer the feel of the silicone.
Cymbals are a hard plastic as opposed to the rubber on the Yamaha. Not sure I have a preference on this as neither feel like the real thing. The hi hat pedal is surprisingly responsive given that it's not actually attached to a hi hat and you can do heel splashes with it. I'll probably replace with a Lemon two cymbal unit though.
Sounds..... the kits in the unit sound as good to me. The small jazz and warm jazz I love, and surprisingly the metal kit has a great ring to it as well for cutting through in funk stuff. There's some dryer sounds in there as well which I like for that ultra damped sound. I programmed a lot of sample layering on the Yamaha and the Roland has the same ability so I'll spend some time building up my ideal kits.
The frame.... as always with ekits frames, I struggle to get the setup I want. I'm just using this for practice but if it was going on the road I'd have to get a Gibraltar setup or something similar to make it easier. I find the frames they come with are ok if you're going for the standard 'rock' style setup, but anything else is a bit of a struggle and the head placements and angles are not quite available. The same with the Yamaha. The one thing I would give in Rolands favour is that the hardware, and particularly the clamps are of a stronger build. The Yamaha clamps would never tighten enough to stop rotation on the tubes especially on the snare. During a gig you were always having to pull the snare back level, to the point where I gave up using the frame and put it on a separate snare stand. The toms would creep as well but not as much, the Roland however doesn't seem to suffer this issue.
Overall though this is more than adequate for a practice kit. The only thing that I really don't like about the Roland (and this is a personal thing that I don't even know where it comes from) is the look of the module. For some bizzare reason it depresses me! It's black, perfunctory, it's like someone designed it on a Friday because they had somewhere better to be, or just had no flare in them... it's horrible. It does the job well enough, no fancy screen with colour graphics but it doesn't need it. Having said that I have to cover it with a cloth so its lack of aesthetics doesn't offend me. Talking of the module the ability to quickly access the level of each pad is good, for the Yamaha that was buried in a sub menu, but the DTX module had a quick access mixer function for the whole kit which I miss on the TD. Oh, and the rim shots on the snare do not seem to be as good as that on the Yamaha but not so as it's a problem.