While it's not really quite so simple, it seems generally like planes are of three types:
1) euro, american, continental - two hands, front to back, push (continental generally with the iron further back
2) chinese - two hands, look sort of like a pull plane, but cross bar to push from behind - directly behind if possible. can be pulled - so can the planes in #1
3) japanese - pull, no provision to push
I've had all three, but limited numbers of 2 and it's awkward to use a western bench and push from behind, anyway.
There's no advantage to gain with japanese planes, but if you spend your life pulling tools and all of your neurons are set to do that, it'll be fairly hard to push saws and planes without transition time. They have plenty of saws and the chipbreaker on their planes to work hard or less than perfect woods, but that kind of thing isn't sold much here. What's harder for us is figuring out a good way to use their saws to rip (more or less need a custom saw if you want to rip western woods with any efficiency).
There is one drawback to the planes, though, or two:
1) if you're in infrequent user, you'll have to condition the sole of the plane each time you smooth something
2) you'll be sharpening a fairly wide chord of iron, and the iron will likely be something that wears no slower than O1 (despite the comments about all of the irons that hold an edge forever). The advantage of fine grained steel is on the chisel side (high hardness and edge strength). Translation - maintaining the edge without grinding (grinding is actually fine with most irons - the tempering temperature being super low is exaggerated - blue and white schedules from hitachi start around 300-325F. Use your fingers to feel and judgement otherwise. Translation attempt 2!! - if you follow their methods to sharpen, and imitate neatness you see in tutorials, you'll get the same life as western tools but four times the sharpening time involved and repairing chips will be agonizing - and you're fighting clearance issues at the same time.
The more wear resistant irons other than high speed steel are dogs (the super blue is just OK but often has disparate carbides that lead to unexpected small chips - it's extremely overpriced for what it is. edge life is only about the same as A2 at the very best, which is only marginally better than good O1).
No great convention with their planes to joint hardwood panels of flatten large surfaces, either - you'd want to keep a metal jointer on hand to remove ripples and other surface disturbances that start and then continue as the sole profile allows them to propagate.
All that said, the surface brightness in perfect softwoods is hard to match with a western plane. It can be matched with a stanley if you buff the bevel side, strangely enough. Not sure if the way it's achieved is the same, though (severing vs. burnishing while cutting), but the outcome is similar.
I have some crosscut saws that I got from japan that have a more generalized tooth profile - they cut dandy in everything, including hardwoods, and their temper is resharpenable. The heavy promotion of their woodworking culture appears to be more of an export thing than in country, at least when it comes to numbers (i'm sure they subsidize some artisans as claimed, but the number is limited. Most of the ____-san talk is aimed at us, as are most of the expensive tools. The legit guys working over there tend to have tools that look more like used tools that are used more than looked at or preened). Reason I mention this is if you're willing to go to their version of ebay, you can get all kinds of wonderful things used for not much money. I've seen zero difference between a $75 old stock kanna pair and an $800 plane sold by someone speaking english, except that folks in country will buy the former, and I doubt they buy much of the latter).
