I'm not in an ASCII-english speaking country, and it's not like that at all. And all projects that started to rectify TeX with regards to unicode text, have fallen behind or are totally abandoned (I speak of stuff like LaTeX3e, Omega et al).
> Isn't this sort of the problem with WYSIWYG in general, though?
For some it's the problem, for others it's the allure. I like Framemaker style tools myself --but Adobe it has had it stagnate, and it's also not on the Mac.
> 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?
It has styles, and can present a list of them et al. Not many people use it that way, but it's quite powerful. Not as powerful as Framemaker though.
> My text editor does that for me, and I'm not distracted by presentation issues while I type my document.
No, but you are distracted of keeping a syntax NOT RELATED to the document content in your head.
> How so? Text flow around images is an issue in TeX - have Quark or InDesign really improved much otherwise?
There have been improved hyphenation/justification algorithms during the 90's that InDesign et al utilize, that provide better visual output even for simple paragraph text compared to plain ole TeX. Mainly utilizing the hz algorithm.