1) When I see that a library has a note about threading, I generally expect that it will either be "its thread safe" or "these operations are not thread safe and you need your own synchronization." I think having no ability to share realms/objects across threads is really unusual, and it would be better if the docs made that requirement clearer at the beginning.
2) My use case was reasonably simple - background thread A listens for messages about some expensive work to do, it updates the UI thread with the work, and then it spawns thread B to do that expensive work and keeps listening, thread B updates the worklist on the UI thread on completion. Based on my understanding of realm, I was going to have 3 copies of each object, one on each thread. Traditionally, I would expect one in-memory copy, with the threads using synchronized methods to modify the data. Then, when thread B completes, it just updates its work item and then notifies the UI thread to re-render.
Maybe I misunderstood it, or there is some really simple architecture to handle this issue, but that is how it seemed to me from the documentation.