That is an interesting thought. The look screen usually offers a simply enough way to make a call to emergency services (works with locked phone and sim as well).
This is no different then with the Fairphone, other that the Launcher from the Fairphone is optimized to safe screen space. I suggest you use a different launcher, if you do not like the current experience. If you install the launcher Launcher3 from F-droid (see Android Launchers for other recommendations) for example your phone will behave more like the traditional android phones do AND you won’t loose all the useful additions from Fairphone. For illustrations: My Fairphone Home Screen with (1) Fairphone Launcher (Fairphone OS v2) and (2) Launcher3:
I have been running my phone without the Google Apps for about a year and was not missing much. Compared to Android, the Google Apps are not open source. They install themselves deeply into the system and of course, they use valuable processing resources. I finally installed GApps because of some Apps like DB-Navigator or WhatsApp i find very useful.