I have noticed they cut tons of features from the iOS versions and keep you from using the site if they're installed (and maybe even if they're not? That's got to be how I ended up with them installed, I wouldn't have done it by choice), which is super annoying and makes no sense since I'm sure it's all the same webtech crap as the "real" sites, just wrapped so it's "native".
Yes? I use a Linux laptop + firefox, g suite works great even for docs that have hundreds of pages (though I do use a top of the line Lenovo P series with an i7 and 32GB of ram).
Re web-tech: All iPad/iOS browsers run a low-perf version of Safari under the hood. In my experience anything Google seems sluggish on Safari. Frankly, I think that a part of this is due to FUD (Safari is not slow).
I still use FF and Safari for 99% of my browsing, but certain sites just require me to use Chrome.
Web views aren’t the same, neither is the JS runtime configuration, hence the performance differences.