I agree, there is a lot here that is not well researched, right down to not correctly capitalizing LaTeX and TeX. However, to your point, it's an unfortunate thing that neither kerning nor hyphenation are on by default in the versions of Office that can do it: Word alone has tons of poor defaults (and most people don't know how to change them, even I shudder at the thought of messing with Normal.dot). It's the usual reluctance of MS to break with the past.

Also, while we're at it, why is paragraph spacing NOT prominently accessible from a toolbar or the ribbon? In Mac Office 2011, I can only find it in the Format Paragraph dialog box, straight from 1995, as there is no more formatting palette. It's like they are begging everybody to continue hitting Enter twice between paragraphs (you know who you are, stop it already!).

Aparently, kerning is off by default and only applies to the 8-bit codepages. Word doesn't use OpenType GPOS kerning at all, either.

You can get kerning working in Word 2003.