In my personal experience I've found very few (in fact I can think of none) people who've really got used to the ribbon, in terms of knowing where they can find things on it. Obviously this is an anecdote rather than statistics, but I'm talking a lot of people, who spend much of their working life in Word and Excel. I'm in the same boat too - it just frustrates me that so much of the feature placement within it seems illogical, and I don't quite understand why I've had such a hard time getting familiar with it. I've been using it for years now, and I was completely open minded at the start (when I got the first beta with a ribbon I thought it was an awesome idea), it just hasn't worked out for me.
I think the ribbon is okay. I had just as hard a time finding things in Word/Excel 2003 as I did in Word/Excel 2007 but after a while the design started to make sense. I still had to google things but I also had that problem with the older versions.
Word 2007 worked much better for mathematical documents than 2003 and once you learned the shortcuts (it even allows some tex like functionality) short reports work out much faster than emacs+auctex or lyx while still looking generally good.
