AbiWord
Most of us are familiar with Word and most of us don't understand half of it. Yes, it is all jolly clever, but most of us don't use a fraction of the features available. Abiword is probably all you'll ever need, and is completely free.
Layout features include tables, bullet lists, images, footnotes, styles and the rest. Unless you can share documents though, such goodies are pointless. Abiword can read and write all the main standard file formats, including Word, OpenOffice, WordPerfect, rich text, HTL and more. You also get a spell-checker and it even has a mail-merge function.
AbiWord comes in a range of flavours. It runs under Windows, Linux, QNX, FreeBSD, Solaris and Mac OSX, and in a multitude of languages too. All in all, it is well worth a look if you want to mangle some words and don't fancy some bloated commercial offering to do it for you.