- all linux distros have touch support, the implementation of that touch support varies not with the distro, but with the desktop environment. Currently, Gnome and KDE have had full multi-touch support for years, and if you really want to get the most out of the comfort of touch, you should probably go for Gnome 3.14 or KDE 5, with that connotation that KDE 5 isn't entirely finished yet.
- Ubuntu Touch has touch support, however, according to the latest info from Canonical (the company that markets Ubuntu), it will not be implemented until version 16.04, which is still more than a year away. You can however already get a feeling of what touch support on Ubuntu Unity will be like by installing the experimental Unity Shell, which has touch functionality, but it is really buggy, and it will only work on Ubuntu 14.10, which may work on your system right out of the box, or it may not. Lately, the development releases of Ubuntu haven't been the most easy to work with. Generally, it's better to install a LTS release, and that would be 14.04, but that has no touch support. You could of course go for a non-Canonical Ubuntu version, there are several community Ubuntu distros, that offer more mainstream display servers and desktop environments, like Ubuntu with Gnome and Kubuntu (with KDE). Ubuntu is not bleeding edge though, you won't have access to the latest Gnome or KDE unless you compile them yourself. If you want to get the most out of a next-gen multi-touch experience (and that is much more evolved and modern than on Windows 8, think Android), and don't want to compile yourself or do a lot of manual configuration, go with Fedora, OpenSuSE, Sabayon, or even Manjaro with KDE, which is the only distro right now that offers KDE 5 in release version.
- linux is easy to learn, depending on how much you want to know, because the sky is the limit, it's open source, you can dig as deep as you want, all the way up to the hardware if you want. OpenSuSE is great in that it offers the most GUI tools of any distro, and is the only distro with full online manuals. Manjaro also offers a lot of GUI tools, and is based on Arch, which offers the benefit of having the ArchWiki, which is the best linux wiki out there.
- a live boot on a thumbdriveis often frustratingly slow and has limited functionality because you're running a live environment, not optimized for your system, but it will give you a good overview of what linux is all about. The performance and functionality of a full bare metal install is necessary though to get the full linux experience.
- you can add any codec you want in linux, and that includes mp3 and other non-free codecs. Some distros, like Manjaro, supply these out of the box, other distros, like Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSuSE, don't, but it's very easy to install an official repository where all software is made available that has non-free issues, like codecs, fonts, some software, and some drivers. Generally, you don't need a lot of non-free additions at all these days, because linux hardware and software support is so extensive.
- linux offers full compatibility with all iTunes formats and all Apple filesystem and syncing functionality. However, the program iTunes can be made to run on linux, but it is not advisable, because using open source tools will give you a much better experience, and offer you much more performance than applications like iTunes.
- Chrome is available for linux. However, in linux, we don't usually use chrome because it's full of bad coding practices and spyware functionality, and because we don't have to, because Google Chrome is actually a downstream product of an open source project called Chromium, which runs better, doesn't contain spyware, and is more reliable than Chrome, and which is available in most repos, with exception of the standard Fedora repos, so if you want Chromium on Fedora, you have to install it either from a community repo, or from SuSE (also an RPM distro, works fine on Fedora). If you want to add Adobe Flash support to Chromium, you have to install chromium-pepper, which is the flash and DRM module, made for chrome, but hacked up so that it can also be used in chromium. Firefox on linux is a completely different experience than firefox on windows though, on linux, firefox has been 64-bit for years, and just works a lot better than on windows. Firefox also offers more tools than chromium, as in developer tools and added functionality, things that linux users generally appreciate, so the default browser on most distros is firefox.
- linux runs a lot faster than Windows. It uses a lot less system resources because it's just better software, and being open source, it doesn't run stuff behind your back, and leaves you in full control over what runs on your machine at any point in time. There is no comparison possible in system performance between Windows and linux, it's a completely different world. A full system install with all application software typically occupies between 3 and 8 GB of disk space in linux... 'nuff said... also, in linux, the filesystems are much more modern and offer much better security and performance, whilst not cluttering storage (so no need for defragmentation, the filesystems just don't fragment in linux).
- battery life in linux is generally better than in windows, because the system uses less resources to do the same or more work, but there is a caveat, in that systems with the latest generations of Intel chips, require the very latest linux kernels to tap into the latest power saving functionality. Basically, the kernel the present batch of bleeding edge mainstream release distros come with, kernel 3.17.8, does not have support for all Intel functionality of the latest chips. For that, you need kernel 3.18, which is available, and does support these functions. The reason why this is the case, is because Intel is very slow in merging their code, because they're afraid of being copied, which means that on non-bleeding-edge distros like Debian or Ubuntu-based distros, the last generation of Intel chips that are fully supported, are at least two years old. On bleeding edge distros, this problem is not there, but even then, sometimes it's necessary to install a newer kernel through the package manager or the dedicated kernel settings dialogue. You don't need any command line work for it though, this can all be set through the GUI on all of the aforementioned bleeding edge distros.