The few vinyl rips I have seem to have issues like a high noise floor (hearing the amplified sound of the needle pushing the vinyl during supposed silence, as well as random pops).
I am curious to know if that's seen as a feature and not a bug.
Many CD are remastered if not remixed, so they aren't perfect equivalents of the original vinyl; they usually also add compression to raise the perceived average volume (sometimes beyond clipping!), which kills the original dynamics and quality of the media. Some early CDs may have been direct conversion of the master into digital form, but if we take an old record and the equivalent CD issued recently, they're not the same thing anymore.
"The few vinyl rips I have seem to have issues like a high noise floor"
That's because of the needle friction and other interference by motor and other mechanical parts etc. all noise which is getting amplified. They've made miracles with pickups, RIAA preamps and other stuff, but we can't make a mechanical device that doesn't generate friction otherwise we would have invented perpetual motion. So yes, records are more noisy and have a much smaller dynamic range, although most modern overcompressed music would falsely suggest the opposite. A search for "loudness war" can bring some interesting information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Vinyl, like CD, has format limitations that need to be overcome. Most notably with vinyl, bass has to be converted to mono and high frequency content needs to be heavily EQ'd.
Vinyl isn't the "original" sound, and you should never mixdown a CD from a vinyl source (since in most cases you have the original master or a tape copy of it) unless you have absolutely no other choice.
1. stereo master tape, not the record press 2. from the same multitrack tape (often transferred onto digital) and sometimes with other audio added.
So it is possible to sound differently to the digital signal. The phono amplifier has to do some filtering, so this influences the sound too.
All in all records are a pretty bad medium for conserving music nowadays.. but for many people the experience is the most important thing.