Alas, typography is one of those fields where most people only ever notice when you get it wrong.
A document presented with good typography might be easier to read for lengthy periods without losing concentration. There might be fewer distractions, like rivers of space running through the text, hard-to-read shapes due to poor kerning, or chunky CAPITALS and long numbers where small caps and old-style figures would not have disrupted the flow. There might be subtle visual cues to help the reader understand the material more quickly, like moving captions and headings closer to the subject material or spacing out bullet lists a little so their items are clearly separated.
But in a world where most people using word processors don't know what a stylesheet is and emphasis tends to consist of centring text, setting it in bold, capitals, and double-underlined, and then hitting enter a few times either side to space it out a bit, I think we can safely assume that most people either don't know about the subtleties of good typography or just don't care. The world might be a slightly better place if leading word processors all adopted better typographical conventions by default, and a few of us would appreciate the ability to produce better quality results, but I'm afraid it's never going to be a selling point for most people.
Word processors may be a lost cause, but we're in the middle of an e-book war (apparently), surely someone is going to display standard epub books better than anyone else and steal that all important typography snob demographic?
A document presented with good typography might be easier to read for lengthy periods without losing concentration. There might be fewer distractions, like rivers of space running through the text, hard-to-read shapes due to poor kerning, or chunky CAPITALS and long numbers where small caps and old-style figures would not have disrupted the flow. There might be subtle visual cues to help the reader understand the material more quickly, like moving captions and headings closer to the subject material or spacing out bullet lists a little so their items are clearly separated.
But in a world where most people using word processors don't know what a stylesheet is and emphasis tends to consist of centring text, setting it in bold, capitals, and double-underlined, and then hitting enter a few times either side to space it out a bit, I think we can safely assume that most people either don't know about the subtleties of good typography or just don't care. The world might be a slightly better place if leading word processors all adopted better typographical conventions by default, and a few of us would appreciate the ability to produce better quality results, but I'm afraid it's never going to be a selling point for most people.