I am glad to pay a 15% efficiency cost to use LaTeX to avoid the possibility of Word corrupting my document in a way that leaves my document completely unrecoverable. This has happened to me more than once. I have also wasted time with Word crashing.

Using a spell checker with LaTeX will eliminate most of the typos and other errors.

And yes, using LaTeX with a version control system and an Emacs tool such as SRI's LaTeX Track Changes gives an excellent solution for tracking updates.