FoxIt is more lightweight indeed. It also allows one to copy/paste from PDF files.

Evince is a GUI application able to read PDF files. There is a port in Extras on Maemo 4.x. It is also used on Linux desktop. There are other utilities like Okular and xpdf.

There are many utilities which read a proprietary/rich document format to simple ASCII usable in e.g. xterm. Antiword does is equiv of doctotext on tons of platforms.