chscag, maybe you didn't read this in my post: "I have a frield who also uses Word as a professional tool, and she uses Parallels so that she can have the exact same version of Word as her compatriots. She tried the OSX version of Word, but it was missing some features (I don't know which) that the Windows version had and that they were using in the collaboration."
I bolded the section you may have missed. A professional writer, who uses Word in a collaborative project, finds that the Apple version of Word is NOT the same as the Windows version. I helped her install Parallels so that she could avoid all the rework that the difference in versions was causing. I'm not "stirring the pot," as you called it, I'm simply warning the OP to make her test pretty exhaustive of all the features she uses. For her purposes the differences may not matter, but to my friend, they did.
As for your snappy, "not true" comment, any difference is a difference, and may be significant to the user who hits that difference, so ANY difference makes it "true."