Well, without any details it's hard to say much. The office isn't 100% full version, as I believe at least excel lacks something like macros and scripts (according to MS for security reasons I believe?), but I havn't found anything lacking from Word on my Surface. It could be this friend of yours has some very specific/niche needs for her school, but I dont see why the Office 2013 RT wouldn't be suitable for school. I'm very happy with mine and it's largely for university use. I study theology though, so I manage far with just reading, writing and formatting fairly basic text. I dont really know what would be the kind of thing that the Word wouldnt be sufficient for in school use, I guess what I can come up with could be the lack of digital inking for something like mathematic formulas, but does anyone actually use Word for that anyways even if they had digital inking?
I wrote my bachelor's term largely on my Surface RT