I can't imagine that there will ever be an editor of choice across all of academia. I'll assume based on comments in this thread that computer scientists must use TeX, but Word is (and has long been) the de facto standard in my own field. My PhD is in Mechanical Engineering; my research deals primarily with internal combustion engines - thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, combustion, etc. During my time in grad school, and since then working at a national lab, I've only ever encountered one person who used TeX, and that was a summer student (Physics major) at the lab who used it essentially as a form of rebellion because no one else did: he just wanted to be different. The journals I've published in would accept .doc, .pdf, .docx, and a variety of other formats (.doc generally pretty strongly preferred), with .tif images for plots, but I can't recall if I've even seen TeX listed as an acceptable format for submission. I've certainly never used it nor known a colleague to use it.
I expect that in some fields, the situation is reversed and TeX is more acceptable than Word. Clearly, there exist fields where TeX is used to some extent, at least. But calling it the "editor of choice" in academia is going a bit far. Perhaps it's the editor of choice in a particular field (or several), but I doubt there is such a de facto standard across the breadth of all of academia, unless it's already MS Word.
