If Apple put a few million into iWork, people like you still wouldn't be happy. It's not the same as office. You've been offered many different solutions in this thread and you've shot each one of them down. From your many posts in this discussion, Office is your single most important criterion for choosing a computer. Why you're still on a Mac forum is beyond me. Buy a PC, sell the MBP. Yeah, you'll have to use a crappy plastic PC but it doesn't matter. You need to choose the solution that works best for you. No matter what Apple or Microsoft does, you're not going to be happy. Office for Mac is always going to be less than the PC product. You need to accept that.
I am fine with the fact that Office for Mac is not as good as Office for PC. I know I won't get Access or Publisher or Visio on the Mac. And that's fine. What is not fine is that Office keeps crushing. That the language tools of Word do not work anymore. That it uses an incredible amount of RAM. That two years after the release of a Windows version, there is not even a public beta of its Mac counterpart.
I could use iWork if it were good. iWork opens well Microsoft Office files. However, there are features that are simply unavailable. And those are features that are simple. There aren't real alternatives. What alternatives are left? Open source software and iWork. This lack of alternatives is simply incredible.
Office is important for me because it is the software I use most. I cannot get rid of it, and it is really better than the proposed alternatives. In the past, there were software that worked as well as Office. Now, there is not.
The fact is that you're a minority. The idea of passing around some sort of proprietary file for edits and long-term storage is coming to an end. There are much better solutions out there but you're right. They're not like Office. Get a new computer, learn new software, or get a different job. Those are your options unfortunately.
I am not sure I am a minority. And I doubt there are better solutions out there. There are solutions that integrate better between devices, this is true. But they do not make work necessarily easier. If I need to produce very complex text, for instance, full of footnotes and cross-references, and complex numbering, and indexing, I will need Microsoft Word. I don't know how simpler and integrated solutions that work accross a variety of platforms would help with that. So, better is very relative. If you need only simple things, then it would be nice to sync simple files accross the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac and the computer at the office. But if you need something more complicated, it won't work out.
I work in an environment that uses Microsoft Office and I know thousands of people who depend on Office for doing their work. Office is standard on corporations and they are not getting rid of it.
As for my options:
Getting a different job is out of question. I studied several years for this one, and I have a PhD on it. I won't get a different job to earn less than half I do.
Learning different software. I tried that. Simpler software does not work for me. I need complicated features, they make my life easier. Not having those features mean that I will need several more hours to make the document behave the way I need it to.
Getting a different computer would be a solution. But then I look at the crappy plastic PCs and they are horrible. I live in Brazil and there are no premium laptops for sale here apart from Macs. They are all very low-end, with terrible low-resolution screens, terrible keyboards and plasticky feel. They are the crap of the crap, the very low end of what you have in the U.S.
