Actually would suggest Nokia over Samsung. The apps that come with Nokia are just so much better than what other manufacturers like HTC give (not sure about Samsung). For example, you can get Nokia Drive (GPS with voice navigation) for free if you have a Lumia, but for me (using HTC 8X and Australian app store) costs AUD45.

To sync from your laptop (W8 or not) to wp8, you use Skydrive (i.e. over Internet, not USB cable). As long as you put your files on Skydrive, it will be accessible from both sides. The time-limited trial is crap - maybe he is trying to say that Office on mobile does not work exactly the same as on desktop? Which would be true for any/most apps that let you edit the files. For example, Word on WP8 doesn't show pages like on desktop, it shows the text as continuous.

It's true that you don't get to customize the phone as much as on Android, you get to choose the background colour (black or white), theme colour (red, blue, green etc), lock screen wallpaper (own image, Bing image of the day, or you can choose an app like weather to show the current weather, Facebook to randomly show your tagged photos), change the size of live tiles (small, medium, large shows different amount of detail)... I think that's quite customisable already compared to some other mobile OSes.

Good that you're not app crazy! Me neither! (but sometimes I scream inside why all the major companies/banks in Australia don't make apps for WP, I am studying there now, they LOVE making iOS/Android apps for every single small thing!)