Why You Should Use LaTeX

Yep. I do agree that you can get better results out of Latex if you really know your way around it, but that's always been the divider between word processing an desktop publishing software (which is terrible for composition but gives you great control over things like font kerning and other formatting minutiae).

What you see in your .tex file is not what you get as the output.

The thing is, we used to have a bunch of word processors that worked that way - Wordstar, word Perfect and so on. MS Word destroyed its competitors because it turns out that most people do want to see what they're going to get. Sure, text-only is less distracting for writing but as soon as you go beyond simple formatting needs or have a need to produce something nice-looking in a limited time frame, markup systems are an utter pain in the ass for anyone but professional users in the publishing industry.