Congrats on getting in! Hopefully I can help with these:

1. From my experience, East Lansing is relatively small and quiet. It exists mainly to support the undergrad. students, so for other activities you'll likely have to head into Lansing (a few miles to the west) or out into the greater metro area.
2. Generally locations within walking distance are either expensive or tend to be louder (or both!). Since you don't have a car, you'll probably want to look for places that are serviced well by the city buses. Most grad. students I know ended up living either off of Lake Lansing Road (a few miles north of campus, very quiet, somewhat isolated except for grocery stores) or near Michigan in downtown Lansing (farther away from grocery stores, but more to do within walking distance)
3. I've lived in a co-op before and interviewed at a couple in East Lansing. As the name implies, they do depend on everyone cooperating to cook meals, clean, etc... They can be great if you want to make friends, but your experience will depend on your roommates. Regardless you're required to interview and meet most of the people of each house first before you can formally apply for a spot, so you'll have some idea of what you're getting into before moving in.
4. The amount of available hardware was fine, especially since we tend to work with smaller proof-of-concepts rather than a full-scale implementations in academia. Personally, I couldn't relate to some of the horror stories I heard from people at other R1 institutions. ICER adds new hardware every few years, and I didn't have any major problems getting CPUs, GPUs or memory (within reason). Also, if your advisor pays extra to rent equipment you would have priority access to those devices.
    
   The real problem is that the file system goes down about once a month and you may be unable to do any work (or even log in) for one to three days at a time. If/when it happens file a ticket and they'll have it working again for you. Lastly, did you see the part in the ICER documentation where they mention that jobs under 4 hours tend to start sooner (hint)? Submitting jobs with a BASH script using short srun commands can do wonders...