Have you tried LyX (http://www.lyx.org)? It's a WYSIWYM (your first point) graphical editor for LaTeX and as far as I remember shows you a pretty good preview of your document as you're typing (your second point).
Has anyone heard of professional use of LaTeX outside of the scientific fields?
I've seen a lot of good examples of the power of LaTeX but all seems ot have been made by scientists. And I tried to convince my girlfriend who is in the edition/layout field (not sure of the correct name). she already knew LaTeX (at my surprise) and she thought the examples were unimpressives. She doesn't anybody in her field using it professionally.
So I was wondering if her experience was specific or it was really unused outsite science. Any feedback on this one?
The biggest caveat I've seen to its use are ballooning file sizes (meh), and (more importantly) leaking information. But I also thought recent versions of Word made it more prominent to discard tracking information when doing a Save/As.
Using LaTeX effectively requires the same ways of thinking needed in order to write code. For people who aren't used to doing this, adjusting from Word to LaTeX is not going to be easy.
In the professional publishing fields, editors have overcome the shortcomings of Word in a completely different way - using advanced GUI tools that have hundreds of options and settings that you have to learn, but that let you have instant feedback on your decisions. Admittedly, programs such as InDesign can actually make prettier documents than LaTeX, but the comparative amount of effort you need to invest makes it rather a bad tradeoff for someone who already knows LaTeX.
LaTeX is good at making consistently beautiful documents fast, while professional publishing tools let you invest lots of effort into getting something even more beautiful, or downright ugly. For the scientist, LaTeX wins easily, but for someone whose primary job is to make things as pretty as they can be, it is not so.
"what you see is what you mean" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM