Just a quick posting to state that I really like Bean.  Bean is a simple, free word processor for the mac.  It's blindingly fast to start up (especially compared to Pages, never run Word on my mac, but I can imagine...).  It's great for relatively simple documents, has partial Word document support (although defaults to rtfd richtext files).  If I've got a quick doc to whip up, I really wouldn't use anything else :-)