Ok I think I'm in sync with your line of thinking. You want an environment that you can run under a Linux desktop, create the apps you want to create, and have them "sent" to the Galileo running Yocto to run (or whereever you are compiling them to run). The problem you have is that the build environment you want will only run under either the Arudino IDE or on the Galileo itself.
The IoT Dev Kit, really doesn't do much of anything that you've asked for...
And yes...Ubuntu is built mainly as i686 built binaries and do not run properly in a i386 environment (on the galileo itself). Debian on the other hand works well in that regard.