crosscut is faster, but only enough to matter in a production setting where the mortiser is running several hours a day.
One thing to note is that a lot of the European crosscut mortisers have a fairly shallow capacity -- 4 to 5". That is a problem when you have housings. Even the stock bar on new mafells is short. We have an ancient mafell (all metal housing, weighs a ton, 3 phase power) that will only plunge 4 1/2 and it really isn't enough for most of what we do considering you want to overplunge a little to allow for the radius of the nose of the bar to keep from manually cleaning up the bottom of the mortise. We never use the machine as a result.
Makitas are more versatile, and also more difficult to operate until you develop the muscle memory for the order of operations. It probably takes 5x the number of unique physical motions as compared to the simpler crosscut machines. But they work well and can plunge over 6" i believe. Also chains are cheaper.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that unless you buy another bar and chain for a crosscut machine (big $$) you can't make a mortise that is narrower than your bar, which is usually 40 mm on stock European machines, but can be had in other sizes, too.
