Without wishing to fan the flames, it's probably best to avoid ideas like "better" and "worse" and just think "different".
Another difference between forging and stock removal is the choices of steel you can easily work with. High-alloy steels require higher temperatures to become malleable and are much more difficult to move under the hammer, so you don't see a lot of forged stainless or powder-metal tool-steel blades. (the major exception is mass-produced stainless kitchen knives, which are forged with very large, powerful dies... usually not one man standing at an anvil with a hammer). So generally speaking, bladesmiths stick with relatively simple alloys. With stock removal it doesn't matter much; you can grind pretty much any type of steel you want. For instance, I grind knives out of everything from the simplest (1084) to some of the most complex (Elmax) steels. So I have more freedom in that regard. That's a trade-off to being limited to working with nice flat barstock that's at least as wide and thick as I want my finished blade to be; whereas a skilled smith can start with round bar or a sphere of simpler steel and shape it into a huge variety of shapes and sizes.
It can also be said that forging requires more skill
to really do it right; it's not that a bladesmith is making the steel any
better by hammering on it, but instead there are a lot of things that be done wrong to make the steel
much worse. Over-heating, working it too cold, not paying attention to thermal cycling... all these things are very bad for the steel. A stock removal guy basically just grinds away the bits that don't look like a knife, and simply avoids all those potential problems.
All these factors work together... what size/shape stock you can start with, what type of steel lends itself best to one technique or the other, whether it's efficient to waste a large percentage of your material grinding away thick stock, and so forth. But as the others have said, "grain" and the final quality that can be achieved has
very little to do with it (assuming the knifemaker knows what he's doing, of course).
This truth is, most knifemakers use both forging and stock removal (whether we realize it or not). New steel from the mill has been heated and rolled or extruded several times, and that's about as forged as it's ever going to get, in terms of "grain" and structure. And I don't know too many bladesmiths who don't own a grinder and use it to at least clean up their bevels and/or begin the finishing process.
