I think it’d be fruitless to compete with Excel when there’s a great product already out there that has 100% of Excel’s features and is 100% compatible with Excel... which is, of course, Excel

The majority of people using Excel really don’t need all the features, they’re just looking to do some quick totals or, in a LOT of cases, just order some lists. I think it’s reasonable that someone should be expected to graduate out of Numbers knowing a lot of the basics to work in Excel and then do pivot charts!