[mbq]

Not at all; LaTeX is a wrapper over TeX made exactly to hide all formatting routines behind structural declarations like \section, \itemize or \emph. To this end it is not really different from Markdown; yes, tokens require slightly more keystrokes, but you get something way more powerful and predictive -- Markdown won't give you nested enumerations, tables, references, footnotes, automatic TOCs or figure lists... Niether BibTeX which will happily eat your Mendeley of Zotero library and compile a perfect bibliography, includes that allow you to split your work into several files or macros that can save you from re-typing certain things over and over.