I attended a meeting at a local Linux group last night where KOffice was
demonstrated. Or maybe that's a too positive word, ridiculed is more
correct.

- It bombed out on every occasion. Trying to spell check killed KWord.
Something else killed KDiagramm
- Comparing KSpread with Gnumerics. How well does the KDE spreadsheet
stack up against Gnome's?
- The same with the illustrator and drawing tools. How well do they
stack up against Gimp?

Can someone describe to me the strong points of KOffice and the points
where it still lags behind (both against Gnome and against what you'd
expect from an office suite).

I'm not sure what version of Koffice was used. But another problem is
that I'm not able to run KOffice. I'm using SuSE and installed the
rpm'ed set from the ftp site, but KOffice complains about missing
libraries (don't remember; think it's libkio or so).