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I'm no big fan of oowriter and I agree that it is not dissimilar to MS Word. Many of you propose LaTeX as the format for writing documents. Well, it may have a long history and it seems practical, but my personal view is that it in't very well designed. You are limited to predefined "tags", many of which are named without a good convention. subsubsection? LARGE large Large? Seems very ugly to me. It looks more like a hack - even if it indeed is a useful one - than a serious format.
This discussion brings up the subject of good document formats and their editors. Formats should be portable, easily readable, provide means to edit styles in a simple way. Too bad there are so little. But don't we only need one?
Think about PDF. There's that 'P' in the name but I wouldn't call it that at all. It's in the hands of a commercial company and if you're not using their tools, you can't be sure what your document will look like to other people. I haven't seen a good PDF viewer for linux (gpdf, xpdf both had problems - no navigation, occasionally unreadable text, etc.). Portable documents must be easily modifiable and you should be able to reclaim information from them with ease. With PDF that is not the case. Allright, enough, this is not meant to be a critique of PDF.
oowriter's document format does not count as a portable document too, as you are confined to OO.org if you want to edit and/or use it. Yeah, it is xml, but it's non-standard, zipped (and therefore not easily accessible) and split into many files. This makes it complicated to edit it by hand or even write a simple editor/viewer. I also think that OO.org is too bloated with features and designed in a way too similar to MS Word (I'm not even considering .doc here as a portable format for obvious reasons).
That's when (X)HTML comes in. It's trivially simple to edit, manage its styles (css). It has a nice structure. It is also very easy to create an arbitrary document format in xml and then convert it to XHTML with XSLT. Taking into account MathML, SVG (though it's not all that supported yet), this is clearly the best available format for all-around documents. There are many F/OS tools out there that handle it nicely for all the popular operating systems.
Well, maybe a bit off-topic, but what the hell ;-)