Wait. I have one post saying it is optimized for touch and another that does not? What gives?
Man, who spends that much time on Office for personal use? There are games to play! I hadn't considered the personal license thing. Surface RT seems to be such a niche thing - too limited for "real" work and not yet competitive with others for general entertainment. Might need to reconsider the Yoga or something.
In any case, she's been picky about not using Word clones like OpenOffice etc. Especially since the change tracking and formatting needs to be precise.
Office 2013 is sufficiently optimized for touch and works just fine on Surface RT. The reason it looks like Office 2013 on a desktop is it is supposed to look like Office 2013 on a desktop. They weighted common user experience above a new interface and I agree with the decision. They also made the essential change in Office with the adoption of the ribbon a few years ago. If I am working on a document on my laptop at the office and then want to do some edits on a tablet at a coffee shop or in a meeting, I don't want to have to think about how to do something on one versus the other. Personally, I also do not get the "its not touch optimized" comments from some circles since they are frequently coming from those who complained that the adoption of the ribbon in Office 2010 was really more useful for touch but Windows 7 wasn't. Set up the ribbon the way you want it and it is very touch friendly and far more useful then some crappy string of unlabeled buttons and document full of poorly formatted text on any Android tablet. BTW, if you flip the tablet to portrait mode, you also can review and edit documents rather easily even without the touch/type cover.
With respect to the personal license issue, it would be nice if people would just give that subject a rest, or at least get some perspective. First, there are no Office police out there who are going to confiscate your tablet because you opened a work document on a train, etc.. Second, if a business is buying the tablet, it has been made clear that the license transfer is pretty painless. I would expect that people do know that unless you buy the single user-single device license for Office 2013, it can be used on two machines (minimum) and with the new Office 2013 subscriptions up to five machines per license. Finally (and somewhat related to my first point), if it is your personal tablet, it is highly unlikely that Microsoft is ever going to question how you use it. The issue was (and still is) only about what happens when businesses are buying for business use. Some of this stuff gets exceedingly silly anyway. You can now, for instance, get an annual subscription to use the full desktop version of ArcGIS at home for $100/year. How many people do you think are really going to use it because they do geo-statistical modeling for fun in the evening or want to geoprocess children's soccer scores by zip code/neighborhood, etc., etc.?