I agree with the Clippy thing, but... I do believe that, whenever somebody responds to software criticism with "he's doing it wrong!", it means the software failed to interface with its human masters in a good way. I thought this was the main lesson "Saint Steve" taught us: the software should be designed to minimize the incidence of "user wrongness", while still allowing for high productivity.

Unfortunately, despite years of efforts, Office still cannot quite understand what a user wants to do. Copy & Paste is typical -- yes, it's an OS problem, because the clipboard tries very hard to copy the content as faithfully as possible, but how hard is it to have "right click -> Copy As PlainText"? Office 2010 still doesn't ship with such a feature, and it's been a problem from the '90s!

Also, on the doc/docx thing, the author was probably going on memory: when docx first shipped as default format, those compatibility hacks (which is what they are -- hacks) weren't there. Pushing new formats to force people to upgrade is the true & tested MS strategy to sell Office, after all.