I am a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales. I love LaTeX because it makes my documents look fantastic and I can do all sorts of presentation and data-integration tricks that Word or OO users wouldn't be able to do in a million years, in particular, integrating R with LaTeX is a magical combination.

I encourage my colleagues to use LaTeX, but not many people are willing to go through the (quick) learning curve despite recognizing and commenting on the obvious presentation differences. Perhaps when their theses' are approaching the 200pg+ mark, with many tables and figures causing their system to crash, then they may reconsider...