In my experience with Debian armhf of a ARM Chromebook (via crouton), all the packages repositories all work out of the box and I haven't noticed any issues. The only exception I've had has been (ironically) the Chromium browser -- but that application is famously complicated to build.
The past few years I've been pleasantly surprised smoothly developing on machines using different CPU architectures is with open-source software (thanks to good automation (build bots), robust unit testing, and hard work by Debian maintainers and their upstream developers)
Compared to the closed-source world of applications (application compatible between Windows and Windows RT, or Apple's transition from PowerPC Macs to x86 Macs), being CPU architecture agnostic using purely open-source software requires no effort at all. But being architecture agnostic using closed source applications of course suffer from the same issues as the other platforms.