Styles are more emphasized - the UI will nudge you away from manually changing the font size of one line and towards defining styles for different things. Word has that functionality but it's not quite front-and-center in the same way.
I use LyX for non-maths. It renders nice-looking PDFs (I use it for my CV (well these days I use Kile instead, but same principle)). It's a pretty marginal choice though honestly.
You can probably get a Word document to look great as well but in LaTeX it happens by default. It actually provides you proper typographical advantages without you needing to know anything about them.
Here's a page showing the effect of using microtype, and some tips of usage: [1]