Sorry - I didn't mean to be too controversial with my post. It's just that I've found that based on the way
I think, Word is a big productivity sink for me. I have a harder time concentrating on the business of writing when I'm staring at richly laid-out text and paragraphs. For
me at least, I've always found that I can write faster and with fewer mental blocks when writing plain old text in a text editor. I found that in my own experience, it was liberating just focussing on the content of what I was writing, knowing that the whole business of presentation was something that came later.
Non fiddling access to hundreds of Open Type fonts and UTF-8?
Xetex + \usepackage{fontspec}
No fiddling required!
Trivial visual layout changes of almost every aspect of the text instead of having to write then in a layout language?
Isn't this sort of the problem with WYSIWYG in general, though? That's actually one of the things that I think is cool about Framemaker - it's roughly WYSIWYG, but you can get a bird's-eye view of styles and layout.
Being able to accidentally futz up the margins on the third paragraph on the 209th page of a 401 page article and not know it without meticulously re-inspecting the document before it goes to press doesn't seem like a feature to me. Has Word tackled that yet?
Can Word give me a nice, hierarchical view of all the paragraph and character styles and margin settings that have been applied to my article? This isn't rhetoric either - I'm genuinely curious. If you tell me that Word has been able to do this since I've last used it, my opinion of Word will be much improved. If you tell me that Word has always been able to do this, I'll feel pretty silly.
Integrated spell/grammar checking as you go, word count et al?
My text editor does that for me, and I'm not distracted by presentation issues while I type my document.
Non in Word per se, but BETTER algorithms for typesetting in WYSIWYG (unknown to many, InDesign and Quark have progressed A LOT over TeX's algorithms).
How so? Text flow around images is an issue in TeX - have Quark or InDesign really improved much otherwise?
Interoperability for the basic edited document format (not through pdf, ps, html exports) with 99% percent of the world (excluding some parts of Academia that prefer LaTeX)?
I think this and ease of use are really Word's big edge over anything else.