Relates to MC-258347.
According to a code analysis in MC-10369, withers were programmed to create snowball particles when summoned. However, these particles were created on the server and not the client, resulting in no visible snowball particles. While building withers does create particles, these are particles of the constituent blocks breaking and obviously not snowball textured.
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If this is going to be fixed (which I don't think so), the soul sand particles should be removed otherwise it doesn't make any sense.
Interestingly snowball particles were visible until 13w03a, in which they fixed a wither-related bug (MC-3169)
Can confirm, although this is probably intended.