LaTeX produces really beautiful results. The output is so authoritative that it can sometimes transcend the content: I once wrote a product development proposal early in my career. I did it in Word using the company standard document template, and it looked alright. It sat on various bosses desks for a week or so, then got NFA'ed. So I re-did it in LaTeX and submitted it again under a slightly different title. Result? Approved within a day. Something about seeing projected revenue figures in an 'academic' format gave enough weight to my utterly fabricated numbers to get the thing signed off. It's insta-cred, at least in a non-academic setting.

However, moving from Word to LaTeX is a bit like leaving one bad relationship for another. Word beats your documents up constantly: splitting paragraphs, applying random styles, auto-numbering lists like a toddler with a calculator, positioning figures anywhere but where you want them, and so on forever. Getting even slightly complex results out of it is a constant struggle. LaTeX doesn't do any of that: your document will be represented perfectly every time; every semantically significant structural element will just work as it should; and you never have to think about presentation at all. It's intoxicating, working with such an elegant tool. But fail to treat it right, get even one tiny backslash in the wrong place, and you get nothing useful, just a screenful of errors.

If this were a movie, LaTeX would be played by Penelope Cruz: she'd take eight hours to do her make up before a dinner date, bewitch all the other diners with her beauty, and then dump her drink on the hero and storm out of the restaurant when he accidentally makes eye contact with the waitress. Word would be Cathy Bates, beating the shit out of some poor writer with a hammer.