niether good for real writers
As someone who is a huge Mac fan, I am very, very disappointed with iWork '08. ...
I voted for iWork 08, but I have to agree with some of the comments here.
The main reason I voted for iWork is not that it's so good, but that Office is so terribly terribly bad.
It also depends on your environment and what your needs are.
At my work, all I need to do is create the occasional "how-to" document or report, occasionally with a spreadsheet in it but nothing really that fancy (no high-finance just regular budgets, data tables and stuff). iWork would actually be great for this, but I find that I have to keep using Office mostly because my fellow workers are (to be kind), "not computer savy." Now this is a major University, so it's not like they are country bumpkins or anything, but they will likely "discover" iWork 09 when there is a bigger wave of switchers later on. For now, it's just unrealistic to expect them to actually use the
easier tool over the more familiar one. They are basically scared of change (like most computer users ironically).
I have shown them all the features and so on and they agree that it's better or easier for this or that... then they go use Office.
At my home, I am writing a book, developing a couple of screenplays, and I do layout and design work for others. Again, you would think that the page layout capabilities of iWork would be perfect, but in fact it's not, because my demands are actually much higher for those projects. Pages is a layout program, but you just can't write a book with it. To do a book or any kind of serious document, you need more that Pages can ever offer. It's actually closer to something like
Microsoft Publisher (which ironically would never be used by any real publisher either).
Office is also not capable of producing anything approaching a book-length document in any reliable fashion. After all the revisions, Office (at least the Mac version), is a buggy POS that would not even sell if there were any serious alternatives.
I find that serious writers on the Mac mostly use Scrivener but it too has it's little weird quirks and bugs. Being as it was designed and produced by someone who is a writer themselves, it has some great, sensible features found nowhere else. By the same token, you have to want to write the way
that person likes to write, and that sometimes is a very bad thing.
For instance it's the only word processor I ever found that you cannot set the number of character columns in the main editing window.