The SMC reset simply drags the processor power and the System Management Controller power down to Zero. These two chips are designed to do a deep reset when power is RE-applied, and to get everything synchronized and working correctly without any pre-conceived notions staying around to gum up the works. There is also a set of stuff (like what Hardware is where) that will be recomputed after an SMC reset, and some parameters that will be set back to their default values.
The PRAM Reset re-writes the Parameter RAM to a known state AND recalculates a good checksum and stores it so that when inspected later, the checksum indicates PRAM data are valid, and can be trusted.
Nothing particularly destructive there, but if you added custom parameters (for example, I set a parameter to get Verbose startup messages) that setting will be restored to the default (NOT Verbose). If needed, any such parameters must be set again manually.