The iWork suite is actually quite underrated.
Keynote, believe it or not, holds its own alongside MUCH more expensive design software. I've used it extensively for high-level corporate presentations and PowerPoint can't even begin to compare. Recent versions of PPT have gotten better, but fluidity of the motion effects is just not there, no matter how hard you try. Everyone at the company loved it... except for the fact that you can't run a Keynote deck on a PC. (And that's not even getting into the fact that you can paste vector objects directly between Adobe Illustrator and Keynote and transform them in all kinds of ways, which is a designer's dream). I kind of used Keynote as a trojan horse to make them give me a Mac and to generally have more Macs around the office
Pages, I don't know as much about, but it seems to have a lot of the same very smart layout tools as Keynote, and generally performs beautifully. I'm sure there are some features that it doesn't have that Word has, but my guess is 95% of users never touch them. Most editors I've seen mostly just use commenting and revision tracking, which Pages does nicely.
Numbers? I love it, but spreadsheet nerds need more. People do mind-blowing thngs with Excel. At my old job they used to have it pull and update info directly from some big database somewhere. And the charting it can do is insane. I'm not a spreadsheet person so I'm kind of talking out my *** here, but I do know Numbers is not remotely in the same league. Score one for Microsoft here.
People don't seem to realize this, but you can collaborate in real time on iWork documents right from the apps. Kind of like Google Docs, but not inside a frickin' browser and not being info-harvested by Google. People also don't realize (and Apple doesn't seem to have publicized enough) that iCloud.com lets you edit iWork documents much the way Google Docs does.
Anyway, yeah, iWork is great -- but in the larger corporate world? Office has decades of advantage there and even if Apple did make a cross-platform version of the iWork suite (which they will not), it would never take a foothold.
Agree with 100% of everything you said. That’s why I hope they improve it. I work a lot with iWork and love it, especially Keynote. Compatibility and feature improvements versus Excel in particular would be very welcome. I hope to someday stop using Office all together because iWork suite is far more power efficient. Great apps to work with on the go.