After reading through this thread and another, I've come to the conclusion that the Note 2 might not be the right phone for you, especially if all of your friends and family have iPhones and messaging is a big part of your life. Yes, there are workarounds, but if they don't work seamlessly for you then you'll just be annoyed and not enjoy the experience, no matter how good the phone is at other things. It sounds like you're 'having to deal' a lot more than just enjoying what the phone can do.
Each platform does things a certain way to make it more attractive to stay than to switch. That said, I think it's easier to go from an Android phone to an iPhone than the reverse. iOS is closed, with proprietary ways of doing things (eg. messaging; same goes for BBM). There are 'open' alternatives, but it's easier for everyone with an iPhone to use iMessage than to switch to WhatsApp, Facebook messaging, Google + messaging, Google Talk, etc. so that they can easily chat with people who aren't using iPhones. This is by design.
There are workarounds for everything, but if they detract from your overall enjoyment of the phone (and especially if you're having to find workarounds for what are, to you, the most important abilities of the phone) then what's the point?
If it's just that you're still trying to adjust to a different way of doing things then that's fine, but I don't get that sense. I get the sense that not only are things different, they're "worse."