Microsoft Office or Apple iWork? For Intel based Macs.

Question

Im starting medical school and need some kind of word processing program. More importantly i need to be able to view and preferably edit pdf files and word docs.
I know iwork lets you view and save as pdf and doc but how easy is this to do?
Does it allow you to see the file as is or does it change it a little when it imports it?
This will mainly be used for viewing lecture presentations as well as notes that my fellow students make. As well as making docs to send to other students.
If iwork does this well i would rather go with that as i've heard that office 2004 is slow due to rosetta and such.

Answer 1

I'll tell you what I use and why, if that helps you in making a decision, but ultimately, you have to decide for yourself based on your needs and preferences.
In my work, I receive Word and PDF files from clients. After I finish with these files, they must be compatible with whatever version my clients use. For Word, iWork will convert back and forth, and for basic documents, it will be just fine. For complex documents that must track changes and show comments, it won't work as well---in fact if you track changes in Word, they won't show in iWork (Pages), and Pages has no function to track changes. Pages is more a desktop publishing program than a word processor. I work with a lot of medical research articles, and they are almost all in Word or LaTeX.
Word runs slower under Rosetta compared to what it would run like as a Universal Binary, not necessarily that it runs slower overall. The only place it does run slow is the startup, after that it runs comparable (slightly slower, but not much) to Word on my Windows 3.6 GHz desktop. Your installed memory will have a significant impact on performance, and with 1 to 2 GB of memory, Word runs just fine.
PDF files: For OS X, there are very few alternatives to Adobe, and none perform very well for editing of PDF files. PDFPen Pro is one popular program, but it won't edit all PDF documents, and adding comments is hit and miss---when someone else opens that file in Adobe, not all comments and changes show up, sometimes none show up, sometimes they all show up. For someone else's critical files, that is not acceptable. On Mac OS X, Preview will open PDF and let you comment files, but that comment you add becomes a permanent text box for someone opening that file in Adobe---not good for critical files.
If you are just going to be reading PDf and Word files, you don't need those programs. But, if you have to manipulate documents and files, and several people are doing the same with the same files, you'd be better off getting Word and Adobe Acrobat (with the educational prices, they are quite inexpensive).