My thoughts?
If you live in the MS Office world and need to collaborate with or just be compatible with fellow employees or professionals, your prayers have been answered. No more work arounds, you now have an official, fully compatible and pretty darn good suite of apps. If you are lucky your employer is already picking up the Office 365 tab. If not, then its just one of those personal expenses that come with holding down a job. $100 seems a lot, but really it's less than $10 a month. You may not like it, but it is certainly affordable. Hold in mind that buying the Office Suite for a computer cost as much or more, and if you wanted to stay up to date you had to pay to upgrade almost every year. For many, this will just be business as usual, with better cross platform perks.
If all you need is a good set of productivity apps, then there are two questions to answer. Do you like and prefer MS Office products. Do you have more than one computer or device?
First, whether you like MS Office, is going to come down to whether you like ti enough to pay significantly more than you will for the iWorks suite, or some other app. If you recently bought an iOS device, since iOS 7, then all the iWorks apps are free. If not, they are considerably cheaper than a year of Office 365, and you don't have to pay every year.
Everything I've read, so far, suggests that the features and usability of the iWorks and MS Office apps are at near parity. The most complete review I've read said that Excel edged out Numbers due to the way it handles formulas, but Pages and Keynote won over their counterparts for 'slightly' better feature set. This from a heavy user of Office on his computer.
Hold in mind this is all preliminary. I have not seen an in depth review yet. No one has had the apps long enough to do more than take a quick look and react.
Second, if your iPad is your only computing device, the MS Office apps are, probably, not for you. Yet. The ability to print, export as PDF, or even to another app are all missing. While it would not be impossible to move or print your document, it will require some juggling using Microsofts cloud service to move documents to another app or cloud service before you can do anything other than create and/or edit them. Microsoft has promised that printing is coming soon. We can only hope that PDF export (arguably more important the printing these days) and the ability to open files in other apps will come also. In the mean time, it would put a serious crimp in an iPad only workflow.
To be fair, Office 365 is real application being sold, and it's main feature is a multi-platform available everywhere productivity suite. Getting it just for your iPad use is a bit like buying a freight truck so that you can make connivence store runs.
And all this supposes that you need a full word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app. Most people don't.
If all you need is to create a text document with some basic formatting then a word processor is overkill. Not only overkill, but it causes compatibly issues, as you need to import/export every time you want the document in some other app or even posted on a website.
There are a multitude of good text editing apps that handle all the basics. They are simple to use, and most of all the files produced can be loaded into just about any other text editor, word processor, or website with very little change or effort.
I read a lot of blogs, news sites, etc. Not surprisingly these writers often write about the tools and workflows they use. Most choose to create and edit almost all there articles in a relatively simple text editor. Then, only if they need to print or create a PDF, they will import that text into their word processor of choice and tweak, if necessary.
I did download Word and take a brief look myself. It's hard to get a good feel for the app, crippled as it is in read only mode, but the general feel of the interface says Microsoft put some real effort and thought into these apps. If you do end up using them for any reason I think you will find them easy and pleasant to use. Well, as pleasant as any productive app gets, and easy so long as you don't need to print or export from the iPad.
{While there is a free one month trial of Office 365 available on Microsoft's site, it is one of those "cancel anytime before" deals. I didn't feel like jumping through the hoops to test an app I don't need and would probably use once every other year, and only then because it was there.}
Anyway, that's my thoughts so far.
