I would disagree that the problem with Outlook.com is not related to the phone itself or the mobile platform, though. It certainly does seem to me that Windows Phone is intended to be used with Windows Live by its average user. For example, using Outlook.com is the officially recommended way of getting Outlook contacts on your phone if you don't have an Exchange server [1]. The camera app is tightly integrated with SkyDrive, too.
I understand that you cannot blame the developers of Windows Phone for this (given the sheer size of Microsoft the teams behind Windows Live and WP may well not share any personnel) but my initial experience as a user makes me wish they had paid as much attention to it as they did to the mobile OS itself.
My wife uses a Lumia 620 with outlook.com with no problems. As a casual user it's pretty good. She manually added contacts to the people thing and they appear on the phone when you next get a sync with outlook.com. I've not heard her complain at all about it so far.
Edit: just spoke to her and she actually used contacts transfer from Nokia to use BT to transfer it from her (drowned but still working well enough to get stuff off) Asha 302 that she was using before. You can also import contacts from the SIM with it but she didn't know that until afterwards.
That problem with outlook.com is not related to the phone itself nor the mobile platform so that is moot. I don't use outlook.com - I have an IMAP Server and work exchange server and they bot work perfectly on the device.
WP8 does play well with Linux i.e. it doesn't require Zune any more to access the device. It doesn't however mount any disks on the device if you plug it in though, so I tend to yank out the SD card and poke it in my laptop. Apart from that it is an entirely self-supporting device that doesn't need machine connectivity at all so it's good enough for me.
As I said, I don't use Windows Live services at all. We have a Microsoft Exchange 2010 system at my company. It talks to that perfectly fine.
I did use it for a bit a while ago but SkyDrive has numerous problems where they delete your files so I can't rely on it.