+1 on VBA... I don't care so much for it, but I've seen some truly amazing and impressive feats in Excel + VBA. And while I'm sure it could be done with Python in LO, the rewrite for a lot of people would be limiting.

That said, I'm surprised they wouldn't try to support Office via Wine for those users that needed it. Also, for information exchange, the defaults for LO changed to MS Office formats for a given organization... though that still has some issues.