The experience on Android is they “just work” as Bluetooth headphones.

My experience with the Bose headphones has been excruciating.

Hmm, I've tried the Sony (WH-1000XM3) and Bose (QC35) headphones at an electronics store and could pair both rather seamlessly with my Android device. NFC helped to make this even easier than pairing AirPods.

Bose looks awful. My Sony also "just work".

I use my airpods with my Android phone. What am I missing out on?

Probably nothing.

They have a feature that’s quite handy to me (the proprietary quick changing from one Apple device to another IFF it has the same Apple ID — so no good for shared hardware like a tv) but “quite handy” is far from invaluable.

You can program a tap on each earbud to do certain things: again, handy but you don’t have that ability I doubt you’d be upset.

Apple’s quite clever on figuring out how much “bleed out” from their own stack works for them (e.g. iPod support for PCs, which open standards to embrace, which not, etc). They are hoping you’ll switch to an iphone next, but even you don’t you are revenue.

If you're not used to it you'd probably not be upset but having an iPhone and Airpods I'd be upset going back.

I switch between my Mac and my iPhone daily so if I had to re-pair to do that that would suck. My guess is many modern alternatives let you pair more than one device at a time which would be another possible solution (better or worse I don't know). Apple's switching sometimes fails for me and when it does it's infuriating since it can end up taking several minutes to fix when all I wanted to do is use the damn headphones.

The tapping is pretty useful too though the features I use (pause/play/skip to next song/backup) are also part of the bluetooth headphone standard so while I can't change them to something else my other bluetooth headphones have the same standard features that I actually use.

This is also one reason I didn't like the Airpod Pro's. Tap is replaced with squeeze. Squeeze requires 2 fingers, Tap works with a knuckle. I can tap with full hands. I can't squeeze it full hands so they effectively downgraded the product with pro.

Well sure, you you may be and I certainly am all-in on the Apple hw train. However the OP says they are an android user.

I guess I forgot to mention “tap for siri” but I’m not sure anyone would miss that much, and I hear android users have a better equivalent.

I switch from my Mac mini to Android phone and back regularly. I don't have to re-pair them.

Bluetooth is supposed to require that but not all implementations do.

Apple has some additional out of band signalling so that if it is paired on one device you don’t have to do any handshaking to switch it to a device it’s never seen before as long as that device uses the same Apple ID.

It’s nice, it reduces friction but as you say it’s a small. Ice to have at best.

Worse in what way?