So much better than MS softyware
I've only used Pages (MS Word) and Numbers (MS Excel) so far ... however, I've gotten Apple training on Keynote (MS Powerpoint). The Apple software is very easy to use and is very powerful. MS is not in the same league as Apple, and I am very happy that I've switched from Windows to Mac.

Not as great as I thought it would be. Rats!
Maybe I haven't really given iWork a chance. As a lifelong user of Microsoft Word, I hesitated before changing. I don't use word processing much lately but have tried to use iWork for making tables and for importing other (non-iWork) documents into the program and working with them. I still haven't gotten the hang of it, although I sometimes succeed. And as far as sending these iWork documents to others without the program, it's been a bit of a hassle, too.

Sometimes the program seems non-intuitive, although this might just be my reaction to the non-Microsoft Word program. In any case, I would like to make it work. So give this a B minus with a possible upgrade to an A plus for the future.

Pages 09
It comes much, much closer to be a 'Word' for the Apple system. Light years ahead of Apple Works.

Better than Microsoft Office
iWork is a joy to use. It's simple and elegant. Numbers actually makes spreadsheets fun. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of Microsoft Office, but it also lacks the headaches and big price tag. I can easily share with my Office-using colleagues. iWork has read every Word, Excel and PowerPoint file I've received so far, and I can export my iWork files to those formats and a few others when I send files the other way.

Eh, Apple's software isn't streamlined
iLife '08 kinda of sucks. Some very basic functionality is missing that makes getting something done quickly impossible. I typically use windows and microsoft office for work related tasks and a mac for home and pleasure. So recently I decided I would try to go all mac and see what new tricks I could learn. Pages is slow to open, slow to accept format changes and lacks good keyboard shortcuts. Everything you want to do is buried in a menu or the inspector box. You can't make global changes quickly and you can make local changes quickly. The best you can do is spend the time to try to make things format right. Forget about exporting to PDF or word because text gets garbled and in word it is broken into unmanageable objects. The templates provided look pretty but I have not been able to insert my information easily or quickly so that it becomes usable for me. Some of the templates have good graphic layout and I get ideas from them but again, hard to adapt. Numbers: apple's answer to excel is impossible. People have created hundreds of thousands of different uses for excel. It is programmable and easy to get started on and impossible to fully master. Numbers is like a program you wrote yourself. It's cool that you actually got it to work but you would never actually use it for anything productive. Just try to put in a simple budget for your personal finances in there- even use the template they gave you, and you'll see that it is not intuitive and of course in typical mac fashion why have a keyboard or right click menu do the tasks you commonly do when you can make an obscure button or drop down menu that you have to suffer through finding to do it. I almost forgot th last product in the package- Powerpoint, or wait I mean Keynote. Keynote is actually pretty good. Again it has some quirks that Microsoft products don't seem to have but overall it is has quality additional features that you can't get in PP. Overall, if you have a mac and can't afford the Office for Mac suite or can't do like I have (windows on VM ware for "work" applications) then it is fairly priced and will probably get your basic documents done but it could definitely be better and more efficient.