Try sitting down for two hours to study the most common LaTeX typesetting commands and to learn how to write your own macros. Text documents should then be marginally slower in LaTeX than Word, and anything with equations far faster.
Ditto. Especially if become capable of using TeX-editing software like Ultra-TeX in Emacs or Vim-LaTeX, with their auto-completion features, you'll be able to write properly typeset text documents in a fraction of the time it takes to write and format them in a WYSIWYG word processor.
Also, it is much easier to combine content from many different TeX files than from Word/OO files, which makes it much easier to do things like compile lecture notes for a class or discussions notes for a project.
I view learning TeX as something like learning how to use vi or emacs. It's difficult, often painful, and hard to see the benefits in the beginning compared to †he big office suites you're used to, but once you get past the initial learning curve, you become remarkably more productive.
