If you end up at Water Place (or any of the
condos around there), you will indeed be near to the footbridge that takes you over to the Indoor Stadium. There you will find some restaurants (including Brewerkz, who make decent beers). at the other side of the indoor stadium you have the MRT station (Circle line) and Kallang Leisure Park - a shopping mall with a reasonable selection of shops (including Cold Storage), cinema, restaurants, etc.
There are also shuttle buses to Kallang Leisure Park, the CBD, Orchard Road and Parkway Parade (another shopping mall that has banks, etc. along with the ubiquitous collection of shops, with a wet market nearby).
There are some nice walks to be had along the river and up to Gardens by the Bay, across the Marina Barrage, etc. When they eventually finish the MCE (tunnelled highway) project, I believe that the east side of Gardens by the Bay will be connected to the East Coast Park. At the moment you have to go along Tanjong Rhu / Fort Road to get to it (I'm just about to do that on the bike in fact), so it will be nice when that all gets completed.
As regards general accessibility, one 'feature' of living down this end of Tanjong Rhu is that to get to the ECP you have to go all the way back down the above-mentioned route. The advantage of this is that it makes this area a more quiet place to live than many other parts of Singapore, but it does add a couple / few minutes (depending on whether it's rush hour or not) to your car / taxi journey time if you're heading towards the CBD.
As always, it's difficult to describe an area completely in writing; obviously a visit to walk around the area would be for more useful to you, but I hope the above gives you some idea. Like any country in the world, each location has its pros and cons. In our case, we like the area - we lived in Tanjong Rhu before, then moved out to the East Coast for 3 years, then we moved back here again last year and we're very happy to be back.
Good luck with your search.