Crazy, I just emailed myself a law review article and some statutes in word, rtf, and wordperfect. All failed to open except the rtf files. They opened in quickoffice, which i dislike.
I use pdfs. From there, i can annotate with goodreader and/or iannotate. All annotations are summarized and emailed in text format, so i rarely need a text editor.
Oddly enough, because i'm constantly being asked why i carry just an ipad, i spent most of the night working on a website that details how i use my ipad 2 for law school (still in hell). I've come up with some very inovative ways of using this thing. However, it's not done. If youre interested. Let me know.
Quick fix, buy goodreader and highlight the relevant text, you can email just the text or the document with a text summary.
Excuse the typing errors, my keyboard is not within reach.