How so? They seem extremely productive and reliable for the org I volunteer at as treasurer.
I've never seen a financial report with an incorrect addition, or hear anyone complain about the word processor.
My kids use google apps at school for things like writing essays and homework submission. Again, "just works".
What I really want is LO to read/write to Google Drive transparently, but that's still an experimental feature (though it works well in TDF builds, but only for password authentication, not for two-factor). Again, it awaits someone spending money on it.
For work we MS Office or LO for MS docs from elsewhere. LO is much better at correctly reading in MS-generated docs than Google Docs, and of course MS Office for people who spend most of their time dealing with documents from outside (not me, thankfully).
We use Google Docs for all of our internally-generated stuff, though -- the concurrent editing in particular is quite useful. We sometimes collaborate on docs, and each person can add their section at the same time. You can review someone else's work on a spreadsheet while they're doing it.
I recently went through an important (and politically complex) meeting where the CEO and I shared a Google doc for taking notes. It was awfully convenient; I could provide him constant feedback on technical issues but let him decide what to actually say, and how to say it.
I'm less happy with how Google Drive is integrated with Google Docs (not well), and I'd like to see concurrent editing in Sites, but maybe someday...
What it'll take for LO Calc to compete with MSO is someone wanting to knock Excel off its perch and spend money on the drudge work. LO finally has decent data structures in Calc and the GPU calculation, now there's all the drudge to do to literally beat the best spreadsheet available. If you got the sort of serious spreadsheet that takes Excel 24 hours to run, and Calc ran it in 20 hours, people would pay any amount of money for such a thing.
(I think Excel is the hook, because it's the one bit of MSO that the people who sign the cheques use personally. Maybe Powerpoint too.)
As a word processor, Writer is every bit as good as MS Word, though of course slightly different. DOCX compatibility is improving noticeably every release; I haven't had any problems myself in several years.
Compatibility quirks are important to someone when they bite them, but look at Google Docs - it's hugely popular (basically for non-sucky email) even though its word processor and spreadsheet are terrible. We use GApps in the day job and I keep LO to hand for when I need something not terrible. Or that offers non-terrible DOCX rendering.
So I think what LO needs is something killer. Not sure what though.