It is very different from visiting, though when friends come to town you occasionally do tourist stuff, and when the kids are out of school taking them to the beach is nice. I don't remember it being boring when I was growing up ... but back then I enjoyed things like hiking and having guava fights. Once I got used to the mainland where I have access to great museums, nightlife, major concerts, theatre productions, all within driving distance it was hard to go back. The nature is still there but the more refined cultural activities associated with metropolitan life are MIA, which I do take advantage of regularly here. Even on Oahu, its pretty lacking: to give you an idea, Wicked just came to Honolulu for the first time in late 2012.
We left because of a few factors. The money factor was a big one - paradise isn't cheap, with milk at $5/gallon and small fixer-upper homes in marginal neighborhoods starting at half a million, and comparable jobs pay about 1/3 less salary than here in California ... we didn't love Maui enough to make the sacrifices necessary to continue living there. The other factor was that while my family was on Maui, my husband's folks are in Arizona and his extended family is still in California, and the vast majority of our friends and adopted families that we spent our twenties with are here. All of our friends on Maui in their 20's and 30's kept leaving because of the high cost of living combined with fewer opportunities for good jobs unrelated to tourism. We realized about a year after we left that California really was home, but with the economy the way it was and my son being so young, we made a plan to return right before he started kindergarten since the schools are so much better here. Unfortunately the jobs didn't come through until he was halfway through kindergarten, but better late than never.
Anyhow, those are my reasons California is a much better place to spend your middle-life years. We did like some things about it, and I do think its a great place to retire ... I may not have a choice about that given my family's situation, but being able to boat to Costco is a nice dream.
Sorry about the novel.
I'm jealous that you live so close to my home resort! Even though I prefer NorCal for a variety of reasons, I would love love love to be closer to DLR and have weekends at the VGC be able to be a once every month or two sort of thing instead of a couple of times a year since only a long weekend will make that drive worthwhile.