True, I forgot about OEM licensing, which can only be installed on one computer and cannot even be removed and transferred to another computer.

OpenOffice is a good alternative if you're writing documents for yourself, for printing, or for sharing with other OpenOffice users. There are some issues with compatibility between OO and MS Office. OO is able to save in MS Office format, and is able to open most (but not all) MS Office docs, but a lot of formatting tends to get lost in the conversion from one to the other. Just something to keep in mind.