Some updates:

• Full phone encryption is pretty seamless. The phone boots into its encrypted partition, and none of the user-facing applications have any idea. Plugging the phone into a computer requires you to enter your password in order to expose the unencrypted drives to the computer (which is nice). The only place I can see a performance hit is taking pictures and videos, and even so, it's not terrible. I just turned my settings down from 16 megapixels. Nobody deserves that many pixels.
• Swype is... getting easier, but still awkward as hell. Even if I don't end up using Swype input (you can just tap the letters, like any software keyboard), the configurability of the Swype keyboard is better than the the stock Android keyboard. Notably: I can remove the "talk to type" button. Because...
• Voice recognition on the phone isn't particularly useful. Or usable. The two options I have for voice are Samsung S-Voice and Google's Now/Voice search. Samsung S-Voice doesn't expose itself correctly at the lock screen, and the voice recognition either doesn't work or is pretty poor (www.youtube.com). To use it effectively, I would need to unlock my phone, which I can't really do when I'm driving. Google Now/Voice exposes itself at the lock screen reasonably, but does not plug in to the few features I would want (reading text messages, notifications, etc.). To do so, I would need to plug in to Google Now, which I don't need or want.
• I was surprised that Google had its own SMS/MMS handler, aside from its Google Hangouts integration. I kind of like it. It does one thing, and it does it well, a philosophy I wish more phone apps would adopt. It also gives me the ability to "archive" SMS/MMS threads, so that they don't appear in the main list, but I can still revisit them if I need to.
• A few days after having my phone, a few weird apps wormed their way to the forefront and started bothering me about signing up for their services or using them to aggregate my stuff. I'll aggregate my own damn things, thank you. A nice thing I found from recent Android updates is that not only can you disable all notifications from an application, but you can disable the application from running entirely (even ones marked as "core" applications). It offers a nice warning, but now I no longer have to dismiss notifications for whatever "Flipboard" is once a week.
• IFTTT, or "If This Then That," a pretty simple utility for providing some customizations / automations to events on your device. For instance, I have it configured to append a line to a Google Drive spreadsheet every time I receive or sent a text message. While this is nowhere near the type of programming expressability that I'm used to, it's still nice to have some options.
• Google has its own "Android Device Manager" application (curiously, built in, and subscribed without your asking). Normally I would be irritated, but the service allows you to log in via your Google account, and either Ring, Lock, or Erase your phone. If your phone has its location services turned on, it can find your phone (but I have this normally turned off.)