The following applies specifically to Pages ’09 rather than being attributable also to Numbers and Keynote.

Observations:
• Although still not as crisp and clear as text on a Word page, antialiased text in Pages ’09 is much less blurry than in previous versions of Pages, so Pages ’09 is now viable as a replacement of Microsoft Word, as long as Find & Replace functionality is significantly expanded in the near future.
• Unable to search for bold, italic, underlined, subscript, superscript, or highlighted text, or text with specific fonts, colors, etc., within documents in which the original writer did not define styles (did not use a style sheet).
• Unable to use clipboard content for Replace All, such as when replacing all instances of “CO2” with the equivalent that contains the proper subscript number.
• Unable to specifically search for only one-byte or two-byte characters within a document, unlike the Japanese version of Word (or with Japanese enabled via Microsoft Language Register).
• Unable to automatically convert double-byte characters to their single-byte equivalents or vice versa.
• Unable to search upward.
• Unable to search for combinations of unspecified numbers and letters or use any other wildcard searches.
• Unable to search for unspecified uppercase letters or combinations of uppercase and lowercase letters.
• Unable to highlight text if the desired color is already selected in the Apple, Developer, Crayons, and Web Safe Colors subpalettes in the Show Colors formatting palette, so a different neighboring color has to be temporarily selected before reselecting the desired color to be applied to the current text selection.
• Difficult to identify the applied highlight color of selected text, as the System Preference’s default Highlight Color is still used even for highlighted text instead of Pages using a color that directly contrasts with the applied highlight color, as is standard in Word.
• Word files with first line indentation lose most of their indentation when opened in Pages.

Desires:
• An option in Preferences that enables certain Views—especially Show Invisibles—by default for all documents, whether newly created or imported from Word format
• Access to the Inspector via the pointer while inputting search (and replace) criteria in the fields of the Find & Replace dialog box, as most documents do not have styles defined by the original author
• Ability to search across all open documents and search upward to find the previous instance of any criteria
• Fullest possible regular expression search via the Find & Replace dialog box but preferably selectable from a pulldown menu with natural user-friendly language.
• Ability to apply the currently selected color in the Show Colors palette as highlighting for any selected text via a single click (without having to deselect the desired color first) and then have immediate visual feedback that the highlighting has been successful by displaying the text selection highlight in a color that directly contrasts with the applied highlight color.