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.

Well worth the cost
Other than missing a database program, this is an excellent set of essential tools, worth every cent.

Beats Microsoft by a mile
I've been using Microsoft office on Windows and Mac for the last 14 years. Wow what a refreshing change. Pages is an awesome word processor and and even better Desktop Publishing program. I have been using Adobe Pagemaker and InDesign for a long time and this is just as powerful and so much simpler.

I had been working on a poster with 50 photos and had spent several hours working in Photoshop and InDesign and was only halfway done. I wipped out the project in 1 hour in Pages.

Numbers is equally awesome compared with Excel.

Good basic suite of applications
Now that numbers has been added, I think this is a great suite of applications. It may not be as powerful as the Office suite, but for me it works just fine. I think the recent Office 2008 issues will drive more people to try this out which will only make this a stronger product in the future. It is simple and easy to use, great for a home user.