Pulsar dev here. There are certainly many similarities with what Kafka provides, though we made some different choices, especially for the storage layer.
The design has been heavily influenced by these traits: multi-tenancy, millions of topics, strong-durability, geo-replication, low publish latency (even when reading at max IO capacity), maintaining consumer position and, finally, operability (we need to replace machines, shift traffic and increase capacity seamlessly, without any user impact).