Tell me again after your daughter goes through her early teens. Kids are still cute when they are that age.
Loving when they're cute is easy, it's true (even if at this age they write on walls, destroy furniture and seek danger with the surety of a guided missile). But you don't know the FULL meaning of love until they try your patience sorely, tell you they hate you, hate to be seen anywhere near you, do everything they can to alienate you... I think it's at that moment when they need love the most, although it is the hardest (Having been a 13-year-old girl, I can say this with some degree of certainty :-).
Your thinking is a product of our times. I do not expect my teens to be obnoxious. Do you really think the teens of 1940 were as obnoxious as the teens of today? (Ya' know, when gum chewing and running down the hall were major problems in school....not guns and sex?)
I've raised two children through young adulthood (21 and almost 20), and they have been a joy since the day they were born. I expect the same with the rest of my kids. Should one cause me grief, it will be unexpected, but that is getting back to my point. Problem kids should come as an unexpected shock, not as one of life's inevitabilities.