There is very little in the world of networking that acts like a file. Yes,
you can go all hammer-nail, and use read() and write() to get data back and
forth, and think that makes it a file - but it's not.
The plan 9 networking stack, in use for over 25 years now, begs to disagree with you. The model works wonderfully well in practice and even in theory.
To take one part of your note, can file reads time out? Well, yeah. We live in a networked world and anything we can do with anything can time out. But even in a pre-network world, assuming that "file I/O doesn't time out" wasn't even true when -- and especially -- in the days of RK05 disk drives.
ron