I also work on some European projects and love LaTeX and git, so I'll chime in.

LaTeX is much better if everyone uses them. However, most people use Word, and at that point, you may as well too. Anything I write I write in LaTeX and convert to odf, then save as doc, but most people only know word and will not be able to work with anything else. For instance, I once sent my supervisor a beautifully formatted latex paper. She replied and said that she couldn't give any feedback without a word copy of the document. Sigh.

Nothing - if everyone knows how to use it. Version control is not as commonly used in research & business writing as you might hope.

You wouldn't believe the amount of technical people who cannot do LaTeX... nevermind DCVS. Also, tracking changes in a text document, with comments and such by the side, _is_ easier than looking at diffs and so on.