Collaborating:One big omission with iWork had been the ability to work with others on the same documents. With the Web version, you can now send others a link from the Web or any of the apps. Your collaborators can open up the document on the Web. No Apple account or iWork app is needed.
It's not as smooth or as versatile as the offerings in Google Docs. When two people try to change the same iWork document at the same time, everything stops until the document's creator chooses which version to keep. With Docs and Office, each side gets the other's changes. It's not automatic with Office, but at least it works. This is one shortcoming I hope Apple addresses before the online version leaves its test phase.
It's easy to convert Office files to iWork and back, but you might lose formatting and formulas. Numbers replaced some complex formulas I had in Excel with static numbers.
Because of this, and the fact that there are no stand-alone Windows apps, iWork isn't ready yet as a replacement for Office.
A colleague in Korea had some trouble opening a Pages document I tried to share through the Web, so I had to copy text into an email message. And stories I wrote in iWork had to be pasted into a generic format for editing.
Nonetheless, iWork is a good option for personal documents that don't require a lot of sharing. If that's all you need, there's no sweeter word than free.
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