No none of that is normal. If it were, no one would buy them or write the rave reviews you've read. What happened when you reached out to Apple Support about those issues?
I don't see an accusatory tone there, just an reassurance that AirPods are indeed what they're cracked up to be, and that GP has a dud because, as emphasised, millions of happy customers can't be wrong™.
Agreed with the above; my first pair (I wrote about them on my blog [1]) had terrible issues with reliability on one of my Macs. I found that the left AirPod was actually bad, and got a free replacement left earbud. Since then, they've been great.
I talked to a Genius in passing and was told that I need to triple tap to get it to “register correctly”, which did not help. I think I’ll actually take an appointment and complain some more and see if they can look at it with more scrutiny.
