If this helps, my family lived in Tampa for 8 years and have lived and worked in Cary/Raleigh for 2+ years. I will try to give you some facts which will be, of course, tinged with my opinions
Tampa is pretty congested, depending on where you live. If you like the green spaces and zoning controls of Cary and parts of Raleigh, you won't like Tampa. It's perfectly legal there to have a strip club located next to a day care and there are tons of strip clubs. If that's your thing you are in luck. There is little to no control over signage and Dale Mabry is a nightmare that rivals Capital and is the main artery that runs throughout south Tampa all the way to New Tampa in the north. It's ugly as hell at every inch.
Tampa is VERY commercial and service-industry oriented. The up side is that you can find just about any retail you want, and places like International mall have incredible most upscale shopping and dining. The retail seems much more dense than in Raleigh--there seem to be more walmarts, targets, etc. per square mile. It's very "filled in" with far fewer outlying undeveloped areas (though they exist but come at a cost of a 1+ hour commute into Tampa).
Tampa has much closer proximity to beaches, tons of sunshine and, of course, no snow or real "winter." It has some schools (UT, USF, community colleges, small private colleges) but none that are really nationally known. I have a Ph.D. and didn't really have an issue with how educated the population was or was not, as I worked at a university but lived in a very old subdivision with mostly non college educated folks, and my kids went to an expensive private school with very wealthy people. So I had an experience of very diverse economic, academic, and social values populations. In NC my experience has been much more homogeneous, where my neighbors are educated, and most of the people I mix with are racially diverse but not economically so.
I don't think anyone cares in either place where you went to school. Disclaimer: total bias forthcoming: In Tampa, it really seemed to be about what kind of car you drove and the labels on your clothes and how much you worked out. I have never seen so many NEW luxury cars on the road. Where I grew up even the wealthiest families stuck to old Jeep Wagoneers for every day and maybe had a nice Volvo as a second car. "New money" folks got all spendy and invested in a classic Mercedes convertible. In Tampa, people leased cars and what you drove was who you were (never have I seen so many $50k cars infront of tiny apartments, condos, and $100k single families). But education really wasn't a big deal and people who "made it" and could afford a $50k car were respected, period. In NC people seem to put more money into their homes than their cars, and care more about the schools (FL public schools are pretty awful). In NC there is more careful growth and development and I've been very impressed with the community amenities--nowhere in Tampa are you going to find things like the public parks and rec opportunites we have here in the triangle. Pools, lakes, playgrounds, etc. are all behind the gates of subdivisions in Tampa. You can enjoy them only if you can afford the homes there. OR can afford a backyard pool.
I like it here in the triangle better just because the lower sense of materialism here matched my own values better. Someone once bemoaned the materialism here, though, so I guess it's all in your own sense of things--that person was horrified when I said that it was totally common for my kids to attend birthday parties where the parents had dropped $1000 on the event, so a party at a bowling alley here was refreshingly realistic to me. It will really depend on your expectations.
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