Hello
What are you guys moaning about? Have you seen the price of Office. Even the update will set you back more than 300$, so I can understand Mac not bothering with one for iWork. Keynote alone is worth the price.
Having said that, Pages is another matter. I won’t be bothering with the new version just yet, unless that is Apple deals with a long-standing general problem of .doc and, more important .rtf compatibility for people with older PCs. You export an Apple document (and this goes for Pages, Appleworks and TextEdit) in one of these formats, send it as an attachment and people can't open it. The only way I’ve found is to copy/paste a text into an old version of Word or else directly into Mail (which shows that the problem has been solved at least here) -or make a pdf.

A thing that really irritates me is Mac's tendency of late, certainly due to commercial pressure, to fall into the Microsoft Office trap of “the boy scout taking the old lady over the road - whether she wants to cross or not!” - in other words there are more and more blobs and gadgets imposed from Day One of using an app. So when you could start doing something useful, you have to waste time going through hidden menus and sub-menus trying to find how to neutralise what are in fact preferences liberally sprinkled throughout - and you have to know what they are called in other words learn obscure jargon. The actuel Preferences window in Pages is very sparse, so you can't do much with that.
Well, as the French say, “Pourquoi faire simple quand on peut faire compliqué?” This is why I can't stand things like iPhoto. It’s all instant gratification, isn’t it? How much simpler to import photos using image transfer (or whatever it’s called in English: I have a French system), send them into Photoshop, label them 'roperly and then do the organising in Finder. It may take a bit longer, but at least I know where things are and the thumbnails are usually quite adequate for identification.
Pages is a prime example of what I am talking about this needless complication masquerading as services. I've come to use it quite a lot, because I find it stable, but what a pain it is looking for functions in the Inspector or the fonts window. Also I don’t like Helvetica and still haven’t found out how to make a document open in Times. Personally I’m really not interested in making flattering “stunning documents” with their templates and always open with a clean page.
Would there not be a way to provide two user modes from the outset; a “simple document” to which one would add one’s own preferences in one’s own time one and a “gizmo mode” for passive users who like everything pre-masticated?

Had a look at Mellel yesterday. Nice sober interface: Phew! A breath of fresh airl. The general architecture seems similar to Pages, but I do like their idea of grouping their palettes together in one convenient block. I tailor-made it to my own needs in no time at all. So, perhaps rather than upgrade iWork, I’ll buy that. But there again, I have the .doc .rtf issue (an Apple one in my opinion).

The new Ragtime Beta looks very promising too.