Sorry, but anyone who says "but they did it before, just wait" doesn't remember that the features were lost in some cases (from what I've heard, Final Cut Pro falls into that category - I don't use it, so couldn't comment) NEVER came back. And further - they've managed to cripple Pages so badly, that many documents created in Pages 4.3 are utterly broken if you open them in Pages 5. And guess what? You can't simply revert them all to 4.3 - the things that 5 strips out are still stripped out. Obviously, good backups are essential in this case.
And saying that no "power user" (whatever that is!) uses Pages is also idiotic, like somehow this category of customers doesn't count. First of all, there are plenty of people who've opted to use Pages in a business setting and many who use it to produce all sorts of fairly complex documents. Not everyone wants to struggle with Word (which is horrible at page layout) or lay out the cash and jump on the learning curve for the big guns, InDesign or Quark Xpress. Pages was a great alternative for that middle ground.
Here are just a couple of examples: try creating a multi-page newsletter with jumps in Pages 5. Can't do it - they removed the ability to link text boxes. Try deleting or moving a page in the thumbnail view. Can't do it. Thumbnail view apparently exists only as a navigational aid.
How insanely stupid is that? These are functions that many people used all the time.
Sorry - there is no excuse for this. None. As one poster on one of the very long discussion threads at Apple said,
"I for one am tired of hearing, "it's a work in progress, and a learning experience for Apple as well". No. The learning experience for Apple should take place before the product is rolled out to the public. The possibility of ruining people's documents and costing them hours of work should not even be on the table. It wouldn't be acceptable for internal communications at Cupertino to lose months of data, and they certainly shouldn't do such to their clientele."
And for the record, I'm actually not a huge Pages user - mostly because my collaborative work both with clients and for my volunteer work, requires the use of Word, and because I do almost all of my page layout work in InDesign. However, I've used Pages for a few projects and do understand what has been lost and people's upset over it. It's not trivial. To claim that it will all be put back in time because that is allegedly what Apple has done with other apps is silly - in this case, it appears that the dumbing down was entirely driven by a wish to make the app compatible with iOS devices - which is very different from what happened to Final Cut Pro etc.
If you want to be complacent and just sit back and wait for the magical app fairy to come along and restore everything, fine. But you'll likely be waiting a long, long time. If, on the other hand, you're not happy, LET APPLE KNOW via their feedback. They won't bother restoring lost features if nobody complains about it.
Apple - Pages - Feedback
Oh - and BTW, if you do install Pages 5, be careful. As with all updated apps, as long as it's on your Mac, it will *assume* that you want to open all .pages documents with it and you cannot change the preference so that double clicking on a file will make it open in Pages 4.3. In order to assure that any older Pages doc opens in Pages 4.3, you either need to use "Open with" or open Pages 4.3 first and then open the document from within the app. Any document opened in Pages 5 or created in Pages 5 cannot be opened in 4.3. Moving Pages 5 won't change this behaviour unless you put it in the trash, or disable it by zipping it (trashing the unzipped version) or turning it into a disk image, if you want to keep it in case you need it later.