First off, the lack of an Entourage-like application in iWork is not an “omission”. Apple chose to integrate iWork with their existing trio of applications (Mail, iCal, and Address Book). Which, in my opinion, is far better than the buggy, unstable pile out garbage that is Entourage 2008. In fact, the level of integration between iWork, iLife, and the built-in OS X productivity apps in Leopard is far better than anything Office has to offer. Now if Apple would only fix Mail’s IMAP support, we’d all be happy.

Second, most of your criticisms of Pages seem to center around that fact that Pages doesn’t act like Word. Well, thank God! Word is a disorganized mess. And while Pages does take some time to learn, it is organized more like a good design application, rather than Microsoft’s unintelligent scramble of functions. That said, the palette structure needs more polish, and a more-accessible word count and beefed-up dictionary would be nice.

Finally, let us be clear about one thing in particular…Keynote is to presentations what Excel is to spreadsheet: simply the best, by far.

And finally, we’ve had the unfortunate pleasure of running Office 2008 on our brand-new, dual-core Mac Pros (with 8 gigs of memory). It blows. Microsoft has chosen to use its own proprietary rendering engine, rather than Quartz. Which may not seem like a big deal to some people, but functionally this means that Office needs to load a sort-of virtualized Vista into your Mac’s memory in order to run. And it doesn’t do it well. In fact, Office was sucking up about 90% of our usually blazing fast Xeon processor, and about 3/4 of the memory. It gets so bad at times, that switching between office apps can take up to 30 seconds. In the end, we were so frustrated by constant, unwavering slowdowns in Office, that we ditched the whole suite. Numbers may not be on par with Excel, but at least it runs well.

When we contacted Microsoft about this problem, they actually told us that this was due to Office’s amazing feature set! I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. Any one of Adobe’s Creative Suite applications is significantly more powerful, and offers significantly more features, than any Office application. But guess what, they run beautifully! Until Microsoft pulls their heads out of their rear-ends, we’re sticking with iWork.

Word and Excel have had nearly 20 and 15 years, respectively to refine. Pages is 3 years old, and Numbers is new. Keynote, which is the oldest app at 4 years, trounces PowerPoint. Keynote is so good that after using it, going back to Powerpoint will be painful.

But thats not to say that Pages and Numbers suck. They are great for home/school use, and they are very powerful and extremely easy to use. And both offer decent compatibility with Office. For the price, iWork is a much better deal than Office. However, if you need to exchange Word, Excel and Powerpoint docs with PC users on a daily basis, Office is the logical choice.