As someone who tried to switch, I can tell you that this is not the case. I remember doing a resume in OO.org, and then when I sent it to my friend with Word to print it off, it TOTALLY wrecked everything. Not cool.
That could happen even if you both had Word though. Different versions of Word could do it, if you used fonts your friend didn't have would do it, and there may be other ways as well. If you want someone else to print a document for you, the only reliable way is to print it to a pdf file yourself and send over the pdf.
Yes, it could happen but the likelihood of it happening between various Word versions as it happens from OO to Word is not nearly as bad. Your point is completely valid, but the severity of the problem isn't as great between native versions of Word as it is coming from OO or another doc type.
I beg to differ, I was going to update my fathers laptop to Windows 7 but he really needs office 2003 because his employees use it and most of their documents fail in office 2010. I've been wondering why, I know it's because they do something wrong with tabs and such but as a Word newb, I can't figure out what it is. This almost doesn't occur when he wants to use open office but of course other issues arise with OO.
There are back-compat features in Word to render files using old rules, so work has been done to help preserve your visual layout across versions.
That said, there's a ton of churn between different versions of Word, so there's no guarantee a bug-fix (or sadly, a regression) won't cause your document to display differently anyway.
FWIW, Word has PDF/XPS export built in as well. (I believe Word 2010 has it in the box, and Word 2007 has some silly downloadable component to enable this).
And, of course, with the free PDFCreator virtual printer on Windows, or the PDF generation builtins on Linux and OS X, there's no reason you can't use PDF from any app...
Not to mention that PDF generation was probably added to word as a response to OO's capability.
Saying OO does the same thing as MS Office, after someone says that Office does the same thing as OO is a bit redundant.
So just to be extra redundant, let me repeat that saving and opening Word documents in Word doesn't guarantee it looking the same (e.g. if you un/plug a printer, it can change the margins and hence the paging of your document) so it's hardly a damning indictment of OO.
If you want to enforce how something looks, you use PDF. That's what it's for. Word's .doc and ODF aren't designed for that, they're more like HTML in that people are terrified of trying to get some simple formatted text to display in two versions of the same Microsoft product, never mind some crazy free software with a silly sounding name. Meanwhile people are somehow managing to send Hi-Def video round the globe and watching it on hardware with the cheapest Chinese chips possible and generally not batting an eyelid because it's based on some kind of standard that's actually worthy of the name.