There is a nursery in NY, ST. Lawrence Nurseries, that specializes in fruit trees for cold climates. They strongly recommend and sell full sized trees, in a great many varieties. They are not cheap, and their trees aren't very big. Bought the "pear special" from them a couple years ago, and the four trees are doing well, but still quite small.
Have you tried Starks or Grandpa's Orchards? I bought some full sized plums from one or the other.
If you want to go on the less expensive side, full sized trees are available from The Arbor Day Foundation. They are VERY small and quite inexpensive, so not the ones to choose if you want fruit in four or five years, imho.
http://www.arborday.org/Shopping/Trees/TreeList.cfm
Semi-dwarfs are actually very nice trees even for fairly large spaces. Much easier to maintain. Dwarfs are too small for country use. Deer can reach the fruit, and so can bears, and when bears tear fruit off your apple or pear trees, they don't do it neatly, almost like they make an intentional mess.. Commercial orchards in NY usually severely prune their close-planted full size trees to smaller than most home orchards would prune their semi-dwarfs. Good for production, but ugly.
Burying the graft of a semi-dwarf is not a good idea. You get a full sized tree on the apple root of the variety, which is NOT the root you will get when you buy a full sized tree. It makes a difference. Some of the cheaper dealers use root stocks from random cannery seedlings for their root stocks. The better dealers use specially developed ones, or so I am told. This is only what I"ve read.. I'm not an expert. In any case, full sized trees are grafted, NOT seedlings.
If you plant apples, try one of the russets. They are not usually commercially available and are great apples, long keepers and heavy producers.
