Definitely not 10x better. But being open source and freely self-hostable give GitLab an edge over GitHub in two respects that are very important to some users.
This was the same with gitorious. Enterprises used their own gitorious servers, and waited for it to become better. Didn't happen.
Github always was miles ahead. Same now for Gitlab. Will not happen.
Frankly it might matter to some people that it is self-hosted and open source. But I myself for one don't give a single wit about it. I want something that works for me and that makes my life easier as a developer. I already have my development problems to solve and in no way I want to add problems of the party that hosts my code.It's just not worth it.