Keep in mind I was just relaying the (looking likely) rumor about Office for iPad. However, I don't believe it will make much difference to iPad sales one way or the other. You can already buy Keynote, Pages and Numbers for iPad, Apple's own office-like set of programs. Many will argue the desktop versions are better than their Office counterparts in many ways.

As far as iOS office versus Windows office, who knows. The rumors indicate it will be similar to the RT version. Office for Mac has always been pretty good, and again many would argue even better than the concurrent Windows versions.

Plenty of people think Microsoft is a giant train that's just going to run everyone else down. That may have been the MS of 15 years ago. Today they're still big, but no one at Microsoft is fooling themselves about who the "800 lbs Gorilla" is in the consumer space today. I'm sure some of them even realize that for MS to flourish doesn't mean Apple can't. MS is in much bigger danger from Google at this time (again, the OEM business).