firstly, you might want to try Abiword instead of OO.o writer. While Writer and Abiword are just as good as Word, Calc and Impress fall far short, I'm afraid. Especially Calc, Excel really is the part of Office that has no competition anywhere near as good.
As for google docs, they're no where near as good. Useful for collaborating, but once you've finished with the content, you have to put it in Word/Writer in order to actually make a useful document.
Of course, for professional work, you should be using LaTeX, which is also open source.
For the media player, VLC >>> MPlayer. VLC is far and away the best media player available for any platform. And it's 100% free and Open Source. Check it out.
@lolita: It's a shame that you can't play The Sims 2 under Linux. Unfortunately, it doesn't work under Wine or Cedega. This is just a matter of not enough support, if there is a market for games under Linux, then more games will be made. Let developers know!
@konnichiwa: no, just make sure you have enough free space on your Windows partition. When it comes to partitioning step, make sure you don't select "erase entire partition" but either select "resize existing partition" or if you're more knowledgeable, or know someone who is, you can do "partition manually". I recommend you select "resize partition" and give Ubuntu 10GB or so. You can get it to import documents from Windows, or you can directly access your windows documents (just create a symlink in your home directory to My Documents, if you want)
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