I have found the new keyboard to be surprisingly good for writing lots of text. My thumbs get tired after a few paragraphs, but that's probably because I'm still a newbie. But my speed after only a month is quite decent. Not as fast as a "real" keyboard (I'm a blazingly fast touch-typist) but good enough...

They've promised us KOffice for the N900, and that can handle (simply formatted) MS Word text. We'll have to see how usable it is in practice. My experience so far with OpenOffice on the N900 is that it is faster than my N800, but the 800x480 screen is frustratingly tiny. You either have lots of text visible at once, which is useful for moving blocks of text around, experimenting with sentence / paragraph order, etc... but with very tiny fonts, so it requires a steady hand and pinpoint precision with the stylus to highlight text correctly, or you zoom in and have only a small amount of text visible, and then it is difficult to get an overview and you spend a lot of time scrolling around.

I'm hoping that KOffice has implemented both a good panning and a quick zooming technique that makes it easy to get around and zoom in and out of a document. The browser makes it easy to navigate web pages, because you can flick your finger to get down to the bottom of the page, or zoom in on a section of text or a tiny button, but OpenOffice doesn't have any of this mobile device optimization.

If you just want to take notes, Conboy works pretty good for that.