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Thanks for all the comments, I will try to answer as best I can in one post. Our job is to encourage all of the application teams here at Microsoft to enable best practices for typographic layout, and there are often competing demands for new features, so this does not happen as fast as we would like. The Hanging punctuation feature is something we would love to see Word support, as well as more sophisticated Kerning and OpenType Layout features. There has already been quite a bit of work done here at Microsoft to improve the Paragraph layout including hanging punctuation support, however this has not been adopted by Word just yet.
We of course continue to encourage these new features. It would also be great to get more direct feedback from customers in this regard also. We will forward the comments so far to the appropriate teams at Microsoft. This link may be useful for more direct feedback if anyone who has posted so far is interested.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/contactus.aspx
this link may also be of interest
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.ProductFeedback
Stephen - My understanding on Kerning not being on by default, is that this was historically a performance issue.
Danny - With regard to making the document design features more automatic, or easier to find, the next Version of Word has a completely new UI which is designed to do exactly that, although I am unsure if Hyphenation is something that is made more obvious.
Nathan - Hyphenating a word at a syllable is ok. If the hyphenated word break happens over a page turn, in other words if the last word on a page is hyphenated, this should be avoided if possible.
Greg - I will have to further investigate the WordPerfect pointer to fully understand the issue, and will post something on this at a future date

mike