I like TE Plus most of all for its text cleanup and search and replace, which I use several times a day almost every day.
Typing is faster than in Pages, which bogs down. I have to wait for Pages to catch up to my typing, and I'm not a speedy typist. Pages files are bigger and take up more drive space. They load slower and are proprietary. TE Plus lets me get to work right now and stays out of my way. The word count is better, line numbering, showing invisibles, and on. I've meant to tackle its scripting ability but haven't yet. I find it a better program than Pages for what I need to do, though I use both. I use Pages for printing, for pasting html text, for documents with columns, tables, outlining, for letters, serious documents. The spell checker is better than in TE Plus, though both are supposed to draw from the same system-wide database.
I used NeoOffice for a while, before I got Pages, but now almost never. It, too, is slow, loaded with far too many features, with a learning curve for just about anything you want to do. I don't need to do everything and I don't want to learn how to do everything. Occasionally it will read documents that my other programs can't. That might be its only virtue.
Other possibilities. A text cleanup program? Textsoap, for example, though it can't do everything TE Plus does. I don't want to add another program into my workflow.
I would like to like Text Wrangler. It's faster than TE Plus, does a better job of handling large documents, but it's more complicated, doesn't quite do what TE Plus does, offers little in text formatting, and is more of a programmer's tool. Like Text Wrangler, TE Plus handles grep searches, and it's search/replace in general seems better for what I need. The interface is better organized. The program is simply easier to use. It allows me to get work done with the smallest learning curve.
What else to say? It's a fine program. I can't even recall how many years ago I started using it. Long time.
