I'm back in school now, but when I was out in 'the real world' I had very little to no use for any office suite on my personal computers. I only used Office stuff at work, the last year I worked there I needed a new computer and we had an extremely limited budget, so I put one together (not counting the OS and software) very cheap. So to keep costs down I tried to use OpenOffice on it, and I just found I couldn't do it, I needed MS Office, too much productivity loss and trying to verify something looked fine in Word after making it in OO. Once I got Office 2003 on it, I was relieved.
I too started on Macs. My dad was getting a PhD when I was growing up and everyone in his dept was using Macs, so he bought one, an SE/30. I played around on that a lot, I remember taking Shufflepuck off the Mac Classics that we had in 7th grade and putting it on his comp. No installing, just copy the application, much like how it still is today for most apps. Then we got a Performa 550, and later a UMAX SuperMac during the clone years. By that time Apple was going downhill fast and we had very little use for a computer when I was in HS. I went to college in 98 and got my first PC then, used PCs exclusively until 06 when I reentered the Mac world. Now I have a mix.