This thing works everywhere, unlike my Nexus which seems to be getting a worse signal by the day.
The Galaxy Nexus on VZW had notoriously poor radios, and it was one of the bigger downsides to the device, impacting both battery life and creating heat. In my experiences, Motorola makes devices with better radios, and the Moto X is no exception.
On the downside, I miss the Android OS.
You certainly should.
It was a little laggy and had some redraw, but that could be because it was the display unit.
I've honestly never seen lag from my Moto X, and looking at the memory usage, I always have a ton in reserve. I previously ran enough applications to really tax and force the GNex to end processes, but that just doesn't happen on the Moto X, combined with the fact that the GPU is that much better.
In a number of cases, it actually shuts down one of it's cores. To your point about rooting, I actually don't see an insistent need to do so on this device. I only did so to run an ad-blocker (which if I rethink it, I may not have had to), and because I may try a few things, later, and don't want to have to wipe data. Otherwise, it's stock and doing what it needs to.
How is overheating? My GNex overheated all the time, sometimes for no reason. It just felt warm, regardless of how many factory resets I did. If in use, it almost got to hot to touch.
It's normal for a number of devices to get warm, but an actual overheating situation is damaging. That said, I don't notice the Moto X getting warm too often. I could probably get it to do so running navigation and some other tasks, but in casual usage, it's fine.
On Android, you can pull up your running list of apps, swipe them away, yet still see all sorts of junk (games, etc) on your actual running apps page. To then go through and force close things just seems counter-intuitive. Especially when some of those things fire right back up without permission. I'm looking at you Facebook. When I installed Greenify on the GNex, my battery life jumped a sizeable amount, telling me that apps were possibly coming back on even though I turned off notifications. Am I making a bigger deal of this than it is? The 5C has great battery, which in my naive way I attribute to the idea that stuff stays off when you're not using it. Somebody educate me, because it is kind of keeping me from coming back.
The way iOS handles applications in the background is more involved. Apple does a nice job of controlling how long an app stays active, so that it doesn't drain battery. However, that may not be your issue.
Personally, I wouldn't spend time manually killing apps. If they need to be run as part of their normal function, they will restart. If they're simply sitting in memory, they're just on deck ready to go, but not necessarily running CPU cycles. Swiping them from the recents list will tell Android to remove them from memory, provided it's not a service, but otherwise, it's automatic.
In my experiences, FB has always been more active, though I last used it a long time ago, so I don't recall what it is doing, exactly. For all we know, it could just be constantly trying to communicate with FB servers. Moving away from that for a second, I do run Google Now on my Moto X, and with its growing list of features, it's arguably one of the biggest potential drains on battery out there (I simply couldn't run it on my GNex). On the Moto X, it runs flawlessly and I can easily manage 24 hours with regular usage, plus all other bells and whistles. Now that's not to say you'll be able to do this with FB running, as you'll need someone else for input on that, but it does prove that a polished app and the Moto X can behave just fine, without sacrificing battery life or the user experience.
For full disclosure, I do run mine in battery saver mode, and thus far, there are no ill effects on performance, so why not? Needless to say, the name of the game here is optimization.
