Yes they are ... "really interacting with them" is not their purpose.
You can open an Excel spreadsheet even if you haven't done so in your life and only have experience using Word ... you can move around, search for text, change styles, print. That's because it uses common interface elements that have been used for years.
Yes, Office 2010 brings interface changes, but it's nothing to worry about ... once you clicked the round button once, you'll learn its position. It took me a whole week to not trip over C-x C-s in Emacs, or to remember C-x C-c, and I had to setup my own shortcuts for common stuff (like C-w which deletes the previous word ... as in Vim, because even if my life depended on it, I couldn't learn the Emacs shortcut). And I still don't know how to print from Emacs.
We are talking about technically-inclined people here. Textmate is a lot more intuitive to use ... I'm still using Emacs because it is much more powerful, but boy what a painful experience it was the first months.