I just bought a little netbook (Acer Aspire One, and I love it) and it came with a trial of Office 2007 so I tried it. Didn't even bother to check on the purchase price, it is crap. Like you said, nothing is in the right place, and some things I couldn't find at all.
I have been using Office 2000 Professional for a long time but it is getting a bit long in the tooth. Lately I have been using more open source stuff and OpenOffice is getting better with each release - it is at the point where it's better than Office 2000 and as good as Office 2003 which I have at the office.
As for Apple "tax" I dunno. OS-X Leopard is the same price as an upgrade version of Windoze Vista, and though Apple would prefer you use it on an Apple PC, it will run on a lot of non-Apple computers. If there was something I really wanted to do that only worked on OS-X I would have no trouble installing it.
I’ve made the switch to OpenOffice and like it. I recommend it to all my friends.
Personally I thought making Office 2007 documents incompatible with previous Office version documents was a nice touch....
L