The MS Office is where MS makes most of their profits, so it can't be all that bad. It's true that there is a somewhat free market, but it's also true that Microsoft was a monopoly for quite some time.
Apple is actually much worse than Microsoft, the only thing they can do better than anybody else is designing a user interface.

I haven't been forced to use microsoft products in ages though, so I have rather superficial view of them. Last time somebody told me they need to spend $200 on MS Office license because they needed to be able to do mail merge, I looked up what it was and how to do it in Pages. It was a little bit harder than in MS Office, but turned out not $200 harder.