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AirDrop and Android -- this makes no sense. You were talking about transferring data from an iOS phone to a laptop.
AirDrop and Linux -- no, you use a method like this: http://www.libimobiledevice.or...
AirDrop and Windows -- no, you use one of the methods here https://it.toolbox.com/blogs/a...
AirDrop is designed for secure and private transfer of data between Apple devices. The whole point of the Apple proposition is to be able to offer solutions that take advantage of the tight integration of software and hardware. So they are inherently non-cross-platform. Affecting shock or dismay at this situation is just stupid.

And why you are fussed about transferring data securely and privately if you're just going to move it to an insecure platform that doesn't protect privacy is beyond me.

As a tech person, was it really so difficult for you to search for this stuff?

My kids school uses Ipads, so this is interesting to me. Although their icloud account was 25GB, which fills up from one backup. I was looking at using this to back them up when they turn them in this year. We rent them from the school.

My biggest complaint is that we have to lie about our kids ages. You can't create a child account without an existing apple product to manage from, there is no ability to manage from a website.
The school 'could' create child accounts, but they won't participate in the program for some reason. I spent a good two months trying to figure out why and complaining about the necessity to create a 13+ year old account for my six year old.

Your not wrong, but check this out: http://www.libimobiledevice.or...

My kids have school ipads, and this lets me take a backup outside icloud when they turn them in at the end of the year.

I'm surprised that nobody makes a replacement application. I remember virtually having to buy one for my NJ3 years back because the OEM software was so bad.

If memory serves, older flavors of ipod where more or less equivalent USB mass storage devices, though they required media files to be stored in a specific arrangement and a little database file to be uploaded, so you needed a utility of one sort or another to do transfers(you could drag and drop; but the device wouldn't do anything useful with files added that way).

For the iDevices that Apple actually cares about(ie. not the 'classic') the situation is a bit weirder and more complex: it's strongly resembles TCP-over-USB. On top of that, all kinds of behavior has been implemented. As the latter link suggests, there has been some work on the matter; but it's a relatively complex beast(which Apple has no particular compunction about changing as it suits them).

I can only surmise from your comment that you must be using a distro like Suse or Fedora, which is the source of your problems. Suse I've used on and off over the years, and never have been happy with them. Just questionable decisions with regard to configuration, setup utilities, and buggy interfaces. Fedora is definitely not a desktop distro. Every time I give it a try, I run into some kind of ridiculous problem (crashy, graphics artifacts, broken packages) within the first couple of weeks. So if you really want a desktop distro, what you need is Ubuntu. It's the only distro, out of hundreds, that is really focused on desktop usability, and that is why people like me stick with it despite things like unity-lens-shopping. There just isn't a good alternative, or at least I haven't found one. With Ubuntu, most of your list goes away:
1) No RTFM on the ubuntuforums. I have never seen it.
2) No dependency hell. Ever. And the PPA respoitories are nice when you are looking for custom packages.
3) No binary blob or proprietary codec war. In older versions of Ubuntu these were opt-in, but now they are installed by default. So everything works pretty well out of the box.
4) For SAMBA, what is it you are trying to do? File sharing is pretty easy to setup in Ubuntu. If you are looking to join a domain, then SADMS is what you are looking for.

As for your other list:
1) What kind of RAW support do you need. Darktable supports pretty much everything.
2) Adobe yes, well, you can say the same thing about MS Office or any other proprietary software. Adobe isn't going to sink the development cost into supporting linux when the market just isn't there. So you'll just have to dual-boot for this if you really need it. Ditto for games.
3) Your embroidery software has a reasonably good chance of working with Wine. I've managed to get a number of simple Windows applications to work this way.
4) iPhone agreed. This is due to Apple suckiness mostly, though. The protocol has to be reverse-engineered to get it to work on linux. It's being worked on, but progress is slow.
5) Bravo SE, seems like they have some kind of linux support, but again, without the market they don't have the pressure to make it work. The upside is they do seem to have an SDK, so an interested linux developer could take it up as a project.
6) Which printer? A number of Brother printers are supported.
7) Silverlight? Don't expect MS to cooperate on this. They could and it would work with minimal effort, but they won't.

No user changeable battery. I push my phone quite hard and although battery life is better than what my friend's iPhone seems to get eventually that battery will wear out, and I want to be able to change it.

Are you talking about phones or tablets? Because the Asus Transformer (your pick) does not have a user replaceable battery. If you have AppleCare, you get free battery replacement for two years from Apple for the iPad, and after that it costs $99.

No SD card, and I need iTunes just to access the damn thing. The amount Apple charges for an extra 16GB is outrageous, more than I can get a 64GB SD card for.

Agreed. This is annoying, and apparently a trend for many products. You can't browse a Canon DSLR with Finder either. However, it appears linux has a solution. Not sure how long it will take for this to make its way to Windows, but it should eventually.

Lack of multitasking. I often want to copy/paste from the browser to Colornote or an email but on iOS you have to close each app before going to the other one. There are no background apps either, for instance I use a GPS logger while I am taking photos on my DSLR so I can geotag them later and it does it quietly while I can look at maps etc. without closing it.

Complete bullshit. I multitask all the time on the iPad. Skype runs in the background, happily draining the crap out the battery, and receives calls/chats while I'm doing something else. So does Vtok, which I use for gmail.

Poor screen. The iPad 2 screen is only 1024x768, too small for web browsing IMHO. I upgraded my old Thinkpad laptop because the screen was only 1024 pixels wide and would never want to go back to anything under 1280 now. My 12.5" Let's Note is 1400 pixels which seems to be about the right DPI.

The screen isn't poor. Far from it, actually, because it is an IPS display. It's better than a typical laptop screen. But yes, the resolution is low. I have mixed feelings about it. It does make things a bit crowded for web browsing and such, but I think a higher resolution would make the text much harder to read on a small screen. Your 12.5" screen comparison is almost 3" larger than the iPad. 1024 pixels is perfectly sufficient for movies and looking at pictures, though.

Expensive accessories and peripherals. Apple charges silly money and seem to be keeping official 3rd party prices high too.

So don't buy them. Seriously, why do you need them? I don't use any peripherals for the iPad. It works fine. The only thing I have considered is a keyboard, but any bluetooth keyboard should suffice. You don't need to buy that from Apple.

Page display in the browser. Android has reformatted pages since day one to make them readable on a phone screen, but iOS doesn't seem to do it.

No idea what you are talking about. Websites need to have a mobile stylesheet. If they do, Safari works just as well whatever Android has (Chrome?). If you mean that Android intentionally reformats pages that don't have a mobile layout, that is indeed a novel feature.

Looks like the iPhone is indeed supported reasonably well through libimobiledevice which ships with Ubuntu. Check the video on the libimobiledevice site. You can't go wrong with iPhone really: a lot of people have one which will ensure developer interest, it's on a relatively slow release cycle so the OSS people aren't continually outdated and is generally pretty good about keeping compatibility between versions.

You don't need iTunes anymore. On Linux, the libimobiledevice project http://www.libimobiledevice.org/ allows you to sync your iPhone with your favorite Linux app (Amarok, Gtkpod, Rhythmbox, etc.).

I've been a long-time iPhone and Linux user. I was ready to ditch my iPhone this summer, but this project has breathed new life into my iPhone.