Google docs is great for a quick and dirty word processing or a collaborative project, but you shouldn't try to write a novel with it.
I'd say the exact opposite. I edit a lot of novels, and every single author now uses MS Word. Not one of them has a clue how to use any of its features. And really, to write a novel, you only need the simplest features. Business documents, with lists, bullets, tables, headings, etc, etc need more elaborate formatting. A novel is a stream of paragraphs. Maybe one or two heading styles, and block text (for things like quoted letters, poems), and a spellcheck. That's all you need and you can do that in any wordprocessor made in the last 25 years. It was a lot simpler back in the days of Wordstar 5 and WordPerfect 5.1.
Writers using Word have gotten less and less able to use it, compared to 20 years ago when people actually consulted a manual before trying. Now they just point and click and type, and so the vast majority just use it like a typewriter, and select text and style it from a button. That's it. They are clueless of and intimidated by the vast number of features and just give up and don't try to work out how to use any any of them. Then they somehow activate one of Word's wacky, "helpful" automated formatting tools and find all their text is in 24 pt red italic. Or they've somehow styled the entire MS as "Heading 1" and have to override its style every time. Writers start new pages not by inserting a pagebreak, but by pressing "enter" a few dozen times, or even worse, hundreds of spaces. I spend an hour or two cleaning up all that crap with every file I get. If I was working with them over a long period I might try to educate them, but few want to learn anything. People now want every program to "just work" without them having to learn anything.
Writers need a simpler wordprocessor. Word has been getting worse and worse as a tool for authors since about version 2 for Windows 3. Its development us pushed by claiming more and more features. Features that just get in the way of 95% of users. To disable all the crap you have to read up and tick off lots of little options. But it seems that also is just impossible for most users.
So, not having used GoogleDocs, I can't say if it really is better, but if it has fewer features it probably is. Can hardly be worse.