Journler is the best for this sort of thing
Journler (correct spelling) is probably the best notetaking application out there. It does a whole lot more besides, like capture websites, multimedia, etc. But mostly it's great for text. You can use it for gathering stuff to write papers too. I think it's probably the best program I can think of. It's currently still by donation. Do a search and download it. Running Onenote in emulation? There's better Mac software for free or cheaper. There's also Together. Very slick too. I don't think Pages is the most obvious choice, but of course you can make it do. I doubt very very much it's better than Word, but this depends on whether you know how to use its features, such as styles, etc. Pages is probably great if you don't know anything about word processing. Anyhow, I personally think Journler is the best thing going.