Lexington/Bedford/Concord are reasonably walkable if you live in a house close to the downtown area (which admittedly can be hard to find & rather expensive). I used to walk to the library, post office, bank, & 2 supermarkets in Bedford, which is the least walkable of the three. Lexington & Concord have downtown areas that are just as walkable as Mountain View or Palo Alto.
The food sucks in suburban Massachusetts though. There're like no decent restaurants in any of those town centers, and you've got a point about them being dull. Some decent places in Cambridge, but then you're back to being too urban.
The one thing I really like about the Boston suburbs is the abundance of greenery. A lot of houses are built on an acre or more, with buffer forests because the streets never run straight in Massachusetts. AFAICT these just don't exist in Silicon Valley until you get out to the foothills, and those communities don't really have downtown areas at all.