I can confirm your original observation. Hyper-V is not a walk in the park and there is not much that happens automagically.
But I can confirm that if you take some time setting up your VM, installing XP, installing integration services (very important) and it is very nice if you have a second network adapter that you can dedicate to the guest VM when you set up the new virtual switch, then it does work pretty reliably.
You can configure network shares between the host and the guest VM in both directions and of course map network drives to those shares.
Probably the most important thing to take into consideration is that VMs created for use within Hyper-V do not really lend themselves to interaction from within the Hyper-V management...