LaTeX is more difficult than word by a single aspect: the compilation step.That's a bold statement that's backed up by no facts and makes no sense. If you were just to stop and think for a second, I bet you'd see how ridiculous it is.
LaTeX is more difficult than Word by about a dozen aspects. And here's a random list off the top of my head.
1) It's more difficult to see how what you're typing will look like.
2) It's more difficult to decide which one to download and install (there's just one Word).
3) TeX comes with its own set and philosophy of fonts that you have to learn, understand, remember and debug. Word uses the same fonts that come with the OS.
4) You need to learn what the hell "DVI files" are and what to do with them. Word prints to your printer or saves in a number of familiar formats in addition to its proprietary ones.
5) Word makes it easy to include a diagram, a drawing, a photo. TeX has different competing "drawing packages", all arcane, all hard to learn and use, all have caused many a dissertation author to curse in despair.
6) You're a journalist or a writer under contract or a translator. You need to know how many words you've written. Word can tell you immediately. TeX? Go online, look for a tool or a script, there's half a dozen, none standard, most probably obsolete or not maintained anymore.
7) Because Word is WYSIWYG, quick iteration is possible: try something, see it's not working, immediately back out and try something else. TeX's cycle is slow and breaks the flow of thought.
8) Word has hierarchical menus, context menus and tooltips, together they make it relatively easy to find some functionality if you don't remember the exact keystroke, command or menu item. Most of the times, you know where to look and quickly scan a dialog box to find what you need. In TeX, you need to remember dozens of commands, or tediously search for them in docs or online.
9) It's rare/difficult to do a local change in Word that screws up an entire page or document; it's trivial to do so in TeX.
10) When you screw something up in Word, you see what went wrong and can quickly undo it. When you screw something up in TeX, you're bombarded with arcane error messages.
11) You hardly ever need to fix up a Word installation or understand the hierarchy of its directories, include files, etc.
12) Word trivially exports to HTML, the great universal language of our times.