Earlier this week, Apple rolled out a pair of product announcements ahead of the upcoming Macworld Expo. But with much of the Mac press covering that, it has been generally overlooked that the long-awaited Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is now available for pre-order from Apple and Amazon, with delivery scheduled on January 15th.

The new Office 2008 for Mac ends a nearly four year wait for the software, and although it still is the dominant productivity suite for the platform, Apple has been busy eating into the market, with its iWork suite now holding about 16% of the Mac office productivity sales. The fact that Office 2004 still runs in Rosetta may have something to do with those converted users, though, so we’ll see if the first Intel-native version of Microsoft’s productivity suite for the Mac will help push users back into Office.