iWork templates help you produce extremely good looking documents quickly. There is also the ability to have tables (real spreadsheets) in the same document as well as beautiful 3D charts.
Word is extremely clunky by comparison to Pages. But a big consideration will be what your lecturer's demand from you. Pages is not Word and if they demand everything to be compatible with PC Word you will encounter incompatibilities.
It really comes down to your circumstances and whether your lecturers will be happy to receive your work in one of the forms that Pages can provide. Pages documents, exports to Word or pdf.
Peter