I do miss not having an obvious time to check email, read the news, read a magazine or book etc
Yeah, but you can purchase open headphones with which to listen to the radio (or music) while you bike. The 'open' part is important as you can still hear your surroundings with those, while you can't with 'closed' headphones and it's dangerous to bike deaf. I recommend the Jabra Sport.
Performance... you're funny. Tell me about your performance when your server falls over with memory problems and you don't have anything like visualvm to figure out why. Don't get me wrong, Java sucks in its own special ways, but I'd never choose Javascript as my primary language.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.