Golly, Wine must be getting good. The student trial (though not the pro trial) of office 2007 from http://office.microsoft.com seems to install, activate, and start properly with no hacks at all.
Can't edit the default document though, it says "selection locked". Guess I'll try the overrides listed in the appdb. I'm just blown away that the whole download experience worked. There were two nits: 1) no progress indication other than on the taskbar, and 2) the file was downloaded to $HOME/%MYDOCS%. Are we not expanding something properly?