TextEdit for my quick stuff and in Mac OS X 10.4 it even saves in MS Word format.
Microsoft Office for things that need special formatting and foot notes.
NeoOffice is slow on older machines. I wasn't impressed with its performance on a dual 2Ghz G4, or on a dual G5. Definitely faster than on the single processor machines, but still sluggish.
OpenOffice isn't bad, if you don't mind feeling as if you're using a fully functional windows hack of Microsoft Office.
Microsoft Office is still the king of office applications for the Mac. It is snappy and responsive, fully functional, with all the features most people could possibly need.
(I do believe Apple has an MS Office killer in the bowels of their R&D department at Cupertino. All the signs are there, and it is a complete package with the backend/network features that make MS Office so popular in Windows enterprise environments.)
The day Apple does release one people can really say good bye to Microsoft. iWorks is nice but it isn't a full featured office suite. Try finding one for the Mac for less than $200. Open Office 2.0 sounds perfect but until it can be ported natively into NeoOffice, its not ready for use by any one. No question about it, Microsoft as you said, is still king of office applications for the Mac.
Or a real application for that, like InDesign, or FrameMaker if you have a really long document. Word processing has gone downhill since they tried putting high-end layout functions into word processors. They don't do layout well, and the core word processing functionality is over-complicated due to the extra junk.