Absolutely! (I work for one) Many (MANY) thousands of system running linux all but the top including desktops (and macs ;) but we still spend MILLIONS on Micro$oft we simply DO NOT NEED! Open Office does everything I need it to do!

Well Almost bingo, I actually would go with a raid 10 sas (vs sata) and you can NEVER have to much memory in a machine... That will fly not as fast a as FIRST write to and intel SSD but from then on it will... OF course if you want rocket speed there DDR SSD with 8 disk raid 10 lazy writes but that's a bit pricey.

No-one said you had to DELETE your old versions of Micro$oft just in case you think you will have a 10 year old document or one weird spreadsheet. The question is about the future path and costs. This version has clearly hit prime time, past version just didn't cut it. When in a hole, stop digging!