Benjamin hat gerade ein Lob auf Microsoft Word gesungen. Da konnte ich es mir nicht verkneifen, auf meine Erfahrungen zu verweisen. Hier eine Kopie meines Kommentars:
My background is very heavy on Linux and LaTeX, but not usually of the Microsoft-bashing kind. I have created my share of documents in MS Word because I usually try to comply with company standards.
I'll just address some of your points by my major example, the final practical work for my apprenticeship. I started writing it in Microsoft Word. I used styles (and page breaks automatically inserted before level 1 headings), I didn't really use pictures, but I worked a lot with indicies. In the process of writing this big but not huge document (the final PDF noow has 90 pages), I had to main problems: styles and indicies. So I'm in a 180° oppisition to your statements.
About the styles: I made a style for source codes in order to be able to change the layout in the end. The catch here: Word did not really apply my style changes to existing blocks using that style. I had to go through the document manually (but I believe I was at least able to use the "Find by formatting" function) and re-apply the style to most occurences.
About the indicies: Suddenly in my index there were many empty lines. I was not able to successfuly reconstruct what happened, but my guess is that I deleted some text where I had defined an index in. Refreshing the index did not solve the problem, the empty lines remained. Same for creating the index again. OpenOffice.org could open the document and updated the index correctly. MS Word did not.
So me having about one day left in my time schedule I decided after hours of trying to fix the problem, that I'd switch to LaTeX. And I did. And from there on I was finally productive in my writing. Now that was just my personal nightmare. It has never been repeated because I have never ever used Word for big documents again. But I know many stories of that kind from other people.
So let me rephrase your sentences "Introduction: LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system ... But it's not an authoring system" to "LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system ... it let's you focus on the writing".
Tatsächlich arbeite ich mit LaTeX relativ ähnlich wie mit einem Wiki. Formatierungen sind mir relativ egal, konzentrieren kann und tue ich mich auf den Text.