I assure you that "Word" is foisted on people who otherwise wouldn't touch it. It's foisted in many, many ways, from project managers who ask for "a word version", to software process methodologies whose official templates are in "Word" to requirement tracking systems that demand "Word" versions of every single document, because the tracking system produces "Word" docs.

I don't think most people distinguish "Word" docs from any printed doc, except those sophisticated enough to use "Excel" to produce columnar-format data ("Word" tables are hard to do and sucky looking).

Most likely when he sends a plain text file to his editor, he gets back a .doc file with the revisions and annotations.