I used edibles exclusively for quite a while because I didn't feel comfortable dealing with flower.  It's a bit of a 
process compared to edibles (or cartridges I guess) because there's preparation and clean-up involved, and also some storage issues to consider.  But it's not that big a deal once you get accustomed to it.  If previous generations of stoners can handle it, so can resilient members of Generation X.  
I keep in my flower in mason jars in my utility room.  Each mason jar contains a 
humidity pack that keeps the herb fresh.  There's not much smell.  If you're standing like 3 feet away, you can smell that there is weed nearby, but no odor seeps out of the utility room.  I have a little bookcase sitting right there that I use as a work table.
Basically, you grind up your herb in a grinder.  I use 
these little metal caps but I don't know if there are similar products for other vaporizers.  You can reuse these indefinitely (clean with isopropyl alcohol to get rid of the resin) and they make the vaporizer easier to clean since you can pop them in and out of the unit without having weed actually come into physical contact with anything. 
Each of those caps holds something like an eighth of a gram.  I usually take about 5 puffs at 360 and another 5 puffs at 380.  That works for me but I know different people have their own routines.  If you do the math here, I'm pretty sure a single puff from my Mighty is quite a lot weaker than a puff from a joint, but it's nice and clean with only mild irritation.  I can definitely taste and smell the difference between various strains, but I can't vouch for how the flavor compares to combustion.  
As far as the effects go, obviously this is going to vary a lot from person to person.  I find that one of those little caps makes me nice and relaxed.  Three of them taken too close together allow me to see the curvature of time.  But I do smoke more or less nightly and I have at least some tolerance.  It hits like Ronnie Lott when I've been away for a week or so and come back to it.     
After you're done, you are left with brown, dried out weed.  Not ashes.  You'll need to do something with that already-vaped bud (AVB, or ABV for already-been-vaped).  You can store it and use it to make fairly weak edibles, or you can just throw it out I guess.
The vaporizer needs to be cleaned from time to time.  It disassembles, and you clean it by soaking certain parts in alcohol.  There's a YouTube video (of course) and you'll have the process memorized after you do it a couple of times.  I clean mine about once every other week, sometimes a little more often.  I imagine these can get pretty nasty if you don't clean them.
Now that I'm used to flower, I really like it.