As a follow-on question from someone who was forcefully converted from Win7 to OSX at a new job;

Is the release for OSX going to be productivity-crippling due to bugs (status bar disappears at random, etc.), frequent crashes (usually with powerpoint involvement), and haphazardly changed shortcut keys?

Love your Excel-for-Windows work though.

again I cannot comment on the OSX release because I actually don't know. If your having stability issues make sure to send those crash reports we actually have some pretty cool collection and analysis tools for crashes that lets us work on the reliability of the product.

No worries, it was mostly tongue-and-cheek anyways. I went from being a maestro at the keyboard to hunting and pecking with the switchover to the OSX version. This is nobody's fault but my own.

I'm very curious to try the Windows version though, what are some of the bigger changes? (Aside from the better pivot tables, better sharing, and smart-fill on the product page).

For Excel in particular the list is actually really long. The big ones are flash fill (pattern recognizition for data cleansing), quick analysis (live preview of different analysis elements with your data), side by side Excel sheets, Chart animations, automatic PivotTable recommendations, automatic Chart recommendations, Data model (Powerpivot - in memory data analysis engine that allows creating relationships between data sources -db style), among 100 more.

Yes: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/faq

They somewhat claim that it will be released alongside the Windows release.

Unless I'm wrong, they are talking about Office 365 which is their web app version of Office.

I'm thinking that by the time the new version of Office is released, Google will make their website more tablet friendly, or beef up Google Drive for tablets to be more than just a document viewer.

the windows and OSX releases are not usually tied together and are actually developed by different teams. I do not have any info on their vnext release sadly.