This tells you almost everything you need to know about these things: http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
The key is that in addition to drawable-hdpi and friends, you can have hyphens for all your resources, like layout-hdpi. But for layout you're probably most interested in the screen sizes, e.g. layout-large.
To answer your question about sharing, something in drawable-hdpi will be available to all screens, but will be shrunk down for mdpi and blown up for xhdpi. The same thing in drawable will use the same number of raw pixels on any density screen, looking small on xhdpi and large on mdpi.