I've got both on my new Macbook, though I downloaded Office 2016 for 20 minutes instead of $220. Which one (Word or Pages) is actually a more powerful program? I'm a student and I'll be using either extensively.
That said, I used Google Docs all last year and I think I still will be doing so for 99% of the time.
I used Google Docs all through grad school. It worked pretty well. No worries about losing or accidentally deleting or anything.
Consider Latex. It's a steep learning curve, but your documents will look so much better. They also look exactly how you tell them to. No more moving an image in Word and having your document explode.