From a frustrating and fiddly experience, you're suddenly given a reasonably powerful word-processing machine with which you can happily create documents.
We also used the device in portrait mode and found it still makes a fantastic word-processing machine, and it shouldn't be a surprise that Microsoft had one eye on the enterprise market.
The machine itself ships with a couple of good games, the AppleWorks (formerly ClarisWorks) word-processing and spreadsheet package, some graphics software, both the Microsoft and Netscape Web browsers, and a good e-mail program.