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Vulkan is a hardware abstraction layer more than an API.

No it is not. Perhaps step through this most basic of tutorials and understand it before making statements like this. What part of what you learned from that tutorial makes you think it is so much more low level than what you do in OpenGL?

Really good for getting down and dirty with the hardware, but way too low level for actual practical use.

While you *can* get more control over a lot of the hardware aspects it is not mandatory to do so. There is some boilerplate code for doing things like device enumeration and initialization with respect to capabilities, you do similar things in OpenGL too but it has become reasonably standard to just use GLEW for that boilerplate stuff.

And check out the Lunar-G SDK (you can sign up for it today). Got my first spinning cube up and running in about 2 minutes (OK, Lunar-G wrote it but whatever!).

On Haswell architecture there is some special bit that has to be set for the hardware samplers to work at maximum performance. There seems to be no details regarding what this specifically means. The original LunarG post seems to contain the best information. What is quite cool is that they claim to have plugged LLVM into the Mesa shader compiler.