The only people I've seen comment positively about GV are those who don't seem to have any experience with VOIP service or other telephony services offering call treatments.

I can comment on some of the points you made tomorrow when I have some time, but keep in mind that I don't care about using a fake phone from my computer - besides, that's VOIP, and what you're experiencing is likely an offshoot of the Gizmo5 acquisition, even though it may be wrapped in a GV UI. That feature is not part of GV outside of GMail that I know of - certainly not possible to do it with GV from a mobile on a data connection.

BTW, I have no experience with ATT service or Apple's visual voice mail. I have had visual voice mail since 2004 or so using different VOIP services - they have all supported sending voice mail (and even faxes) to email. So you can have whatever UI you want, all depending on your email client (or web mail, including GMail, if that's what you want). The voice messages are just wav files and faxes tifs.