I just downloaded Mellel the other day as I've been anxious to give it a try. From what I can tell so far it looks fantastic. Very fine tuning of documents, clean UI, and exceptional organization of tools. I much prefer its use of palettes over Word's. The tools are laid out in a very straightforward and logical manner. I wouldn't consider myself a word processing power user. So, I can't say how its more advanced features compare to Word or Nisus Writer Pro. It's unlikely that I would use many of them either. I did try importing .doc files and it didn't do so great. It threw headers and footers at the end of the document. Strange.

The full screen editing mode is a pretty nice addition, but it lacks the ease of use and accessibility of basic functions (i.e changing fonts and text styles) that Write Room does so well. It also doesn't have the customizeability. I suppose it does an adequate job if you just want to get your text down and do the editing and formatting afterwards.

I'm looking forward to see if this is something that will make research papers easier this semester. The price is certainly nice compared to the competition in more professional writing tools.