For a remedy to the "sucky side" if you have a mac + TextMate, it all _just works_. You do everything you would normally do, and then hit cmd + R which will run the typesetter.

My buddy during my undergrad used LaTeX, at the time the thought of debugging my documents seemed insane (though he could do some amazing ninja stuff like rebuilding his graphs in matlab and importing them on build). Since starting my masters, I've taken it up, and yes it is awesome.