What you really mean is, Science and Nature haven't updated their process yet for the new Office. The standard they prefer right now is MS's penultimate release, Office 2003...
I doubt that MS would really change their formula editor's output format for Science or Nature. This problem probably affects less than 0.1% of all users.
'... This problem probably affects less than 0.1% of all users ...'
But think of the kick-on effect in education institutions and research labs an important MS stronghold. All the best institutions, scientists, researchers want to get published in Science & Nature so they are forced to find an alternative. Who knows what this alternative is. I imagine science students would be hard-core Tex, Latex aware. Institutions have the following formats to choose from ... "MS Word (preferred), PostScript (PS, EPS or PRN), PDF, WordPerfect, Rich Text Format (RTF) and plain text (TXT)" ~ http://tinyurl.com/36hh43
"... The file format needs to be general enough to express such material faithfully. Unfortunately, MathML 2.0 isn't able to handle embedded XML namespaces and as such simply isn't general enough to represent Word 2007 technical documents. Accordingly we had to develop an XML approach that is general enough and we created OMML (Office MathML) ..."
For those who have invested the $$$ in Office it appears that MS wants to give them the tools, just not of the open source MathML compatible type. So there are numerous hacks authors have started ~ http://tinyurl.com/32j48e
"... Science and Nature will probably upgrade some time in the next few years. But I suspect that the rump of non-users of Office 2007 will remain large as the web becomes an increasingly important repository for our file ..."
This bit I think is the crux. You no longer need word or the MS platform as much as previously to create documents & distribute them. I don't think it's Science & Nature shunning MS as much, as the costs in accepting the MS Word format at this point in time. Instead the costs are being pushed back onto submitters who use this particular MS Word format.
