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It depends what you want. All (most) boxes can run 1080p/4k. The question is if you want a nice gui, chromecast support, Netflix Full HD, amazon prime, and the option to use DirecTVNow among others. In my opinion you’ll have endless opportunities if you go with a real Android TV box. The Jetstream or the Mi box S should be okay. You can probably save 10-20 bucks or so buy buying a cheap chinese box, but I would strongly advise against it.
One day you’ll want to use programs which requires DRM. Android TV at its best just works.
It is easy to cast youtube videos from your phone. Extremely easy.
With Fubo TV/DTTV you can get superb quality. Fubo is doing 4K for college football and soccer at the moment. Content is growing.
If you are 100% sure that you ONLY will use Kodi a cheap box could be it, especially if you will use it as a tv tuner (cable, satellite, free-to-air). The Jetstream/Mi Box struggles with high quality live TV (inerlacing). If you are a Kodi man and only want Kodi buy a cheap s905w box or so. Just remember that wifi is shit. Do get a ethernet cable, and if hou cant get one which supports 5GHz AC like the Mi Box S.
I am sure there are youtube movies which tells you the difference between fake android and android tv.
If you're talking about a box and not a touch screen tablet, you shouldn't worry about resolution, all of them will output 1080p.
I think most "cheap Chinese boxes" will be okay for running Kodi and YouTube. Kodi's kinda annoying, I had to keep playing the cat and mouse game, where addon's shut down and have to keep downloading the new version or new app once in a while.
Wrong sub.
720p output resolution will be fine with any device you choose. You are correct saying user interface elements or content that is not 720p will be compressed and downscaled, so you will degrade picture quality a wee bit.
Unless you can get hold of a Jetstream Ultra 4K...
The following cheap device is all you will need, it's the best Kodi bang for the buck on the market, especially considering you can use the excellent LibreELEC Kodi Krypton or CoreELEC Kodi Leia with it:
The resolution is the resolution. A 48x48 icon will have 48 pixels across and be 48 pixels tall. Whether it's Android or Android TV displaying that icon is irrelevant. Every dev worth a shit is going to have the proper icon sizes embedded in their APK.
What you need to be worried about as far as differences between the two operating systems is one of them was designed by Google from the ground up for the living room and the other is a cobbled together patchwork of workarounds to make a touchscreen OS work on a display that does not accept touchscreen input.