Possibly (amongst people who know typography). Ligatures and similar devices remove visual clutter and make a document more readable, and small-caps are just another style of font to be used when appropriate. And Word is hellish to use when formatting a document. So many times I've been editing a proposal in Word and wished that I even could have the kind of easy control I get with CSS (and CSS is pretty basic in that support).
Try using styles in Word, it gets you the equivalent of class and tag name selectors. The UI for it is quite buried in pre-ribbon versions of Word, but there are useful defaults and you can somewhat-easily define your own inline (= character) and block (= paragraph) styles.
That's what I mean though. When you're used to having all of your styles in a simple, flexible text file, it's tedious at best to have to navigate a labyrinth of Windows dialogs.
And what's the deal with employers demanding Word docs? More than a couple times I've been told to re-submit a resume in .doc format when I provided a high-quality, preflighted PDF (which is a nice thing to have when you're applying for design positions: embeddable fonts). Dice.com only permits .doc uploads. This meant at least an hour trying to scrap together a suitable Word doc with similar layout and styling.
Hope it's a while before I have to worry about this stuff again :^)
