Writing markdown with emacs is a huge step up. Now you get to take another big step up when you use org-mode instead of markdown. I'm actually pretty envious.
markdown<->docx with pandoc lets me use a ref-doc.docx file that ensures all the styling I need for legal docs gets into the word doc. So you make a markdown file from the ref-doc.docx then edit the markdown file and convert to docx using the same ref-doc and everything in docx has the correct style, and stuff like line numbers and headers are preserved. Pretty sweet.
What does org-mode do with writing documents that is better than Markdown?