Well, I have Office 2011 for Mac -- the home/student version -- and I have to say there are some annoying things about it. However, it's better than Pages/Numbers/Keynote.

Funny you can't get rid of the ribbon. I did, and then I customized the toolbar to make it look like Mac's Pages -- clean and simple.

For me, the BIGGEST annoyance about Word 2011 is that I can't set a default zoom in the full-screen mode. It ALWAYS goes back to 125%. That might be fine if you're working on a Mac with a large screen, but I work on a MacBook. So I'm always resetting it to 175%.

But in terms of writing long projects, Scrivener is the way to go.