Which is faster bulk insert or bcp and why?
I think you would need to run a benchmark to find out. I would expect performance to be about the same, but BULK INSERT uses OLE DB and BCP uses ODBC. And BULK INSERT is inside the engine, and BCP is a separate program. But it is also going to matter where the files are. What you should not to is to have the files on one machine, SQL Server on a second machine and run BCP from a third machine. But apart from that I would not make any guesses.
Simple or bulk-logged recovery should not matter that much. The same rules for minimally logged operations apply. TF 610 applies to plain INSERT statements in clustered indexes as I recall. With BCP/BULK INSERT you get minimally logged operations, as long as you use a hint to enforce tablock, as I recall.