I haven't played with Office XP, just Office2000, so I can't comment, but an associate of mine who was forced to switch said he can't stand it, precisely because of all the little "help-you-out" features, and radical changes. He actually had to keep Word 97 on his system, because he was using some macros in Word to generate HTML, and Word XP made a mess of it.
I'm sure there are some features available in OfficeXP that really shine. However, most users will only ever use about 5% of the features in OfficeXP, but will be forced to continually wade thorugh all the other prompts, auto-completing, wizards, and what-have-you.
Part of my complaint with Microsoft's software is just that they don't know when to leave well enough alone. For example, my favorite version of Word was the one that came with Office 4.5. (That's right!). It had everything I could ever imagine wanting for a word processor. It had about 250 different commands and features built into the interface. I became an expert at using it. I ignored Office 95 when it came out, but when Office 97 came out, I felt I had to upgrade, simply because I was on a 32-bit platform (NT) and so I figured the software better be 32-bit also. I was hoping that the interface would be largely the same, only faster, with bug fixes, and a few more "enterprise-level" features. Instead what I found was a completely different interface, with all of my previous shortcuts gone. Rather than being faster, Word was now noticeably slower. It now had over 1000 commands/features. But instead of extending my power, the software started doing all these little things that left me feeling powerless. I would start to type a bulletted list, and suddenly the layout would change, because Word had decided that I was typing a bulletted list. If I wanted to go back and change something on the list, all these weird things would happen. Often I would just scrap that section of the document and start over, rather than frustrate myself. Rather than letting me decide when I wanted to use the features, now it was deciding. Maybe I'm a 35-year-old curmudgeon, but I really thought the point of software was to empower the user, rather than treat the user like a child.
Microsoft's two best pieces of software are Excel and SQL Server. That's because they realized that after a certain time, the only use for continued development is to fix bugs, increase performance, and refine the already existing features, rather than change everything. I wish they would maintain that approach to their other software.
Maybe I am off-base here... Tell me, what is it about Office XP that will make it so much better than Office 97, or all the other office suites out there?