Re: Am I missing something about the price of RT devices
Yes, it is real, actual Office. The following are missing according to http://blogs.office.com/b/office-next/archive/2012/09/13/building-office-for-windows-rt.aspx :
•Macros, add-ins, and features that rely on ActiveX controls or 3rd party code such as the PowerPoint Slide Library ActiveX control and Flash Video Playback
•Certain legacy features such as playing older media formats in PowerPoint (upgrade to modern formats and they will play) and editing equations written in Equation Editor 3.0, which was used in older versions of Office (viewing works fine)
•Certain email sending features, since Windows RT does not support Outlook or other desktop mail applications (opening a mail app, such as the mail app that comes with Windows RT devices, and inserting your Office content works fine)
•Creating a Data Model in Excel 2013 RT (PivotTables, QueryTables, Pivot Charts work fine)
•Recording narrations in PowerPoint 2013 RT
•Searching embedded audio/video files, recording audio/video notes, and importing from an attached scanner with OneNote 2013 RT (inserting audio/video notes or scanned images from another program works fine)
That's compared to the x86 version of Office Home & Student 2013. The common theme is largely code that was written in x86 assembly - VBA macros had to be cut from Office:Mac x86 originally, for exactly this reason. See http://www.schwieb.com/blog/2006/08/08/saying-goodbye-to-visual-basic/ for more on that and the technical challenges they faced. I would anticipate that, just as happened on the Mac, VBA will be back in a later release of Office RT.