In terms of compatibility and transferring of files back and forth?
I personally use iA writer and then just email it to myself (you can do this from in app therefore is not at all time consuming) and open on pages on my macbook as it saves as a rtf or txt file i think you can choose. This should work the same with word on mac.
Well I use Pages on iPad and I can download the files from iCloud to my Mac and open it with MS words . And vice versa too. But the page format might be a bit different? (or it's just the view, how iPad pages is almost full screen and Mac word has heaps of option bars.
But pages are limited to its font capability.
How do you get Word documents from your Mac on Pages on iPad?
iCloud.
You can actually drag your documents into iCloud. It's like a normal computer, but just within a browser.