What are the typesetting limitations of LaTeX? In other words what are the things that desktop publishing and word processing programs do better than LaTeX? I am not really interested in things that are better left to the editor (spell check, grammar check) or some post processing program (track changes, word count), but rather typesetting type issues. For example, LaTeX and I really struggle with suppressing page breaks and changing paragraph size. I think even MS Word can do these things better (although it is obviously much easier when you are ignoring the badness of the paragraph). Are there other things? Is there a list or a reference somewhere?
EDIT In regards to the comment by alfC, in the bigger picture the question is what functionality is currently missing from LaTeX (and packages) that exists in other programs. Things like rivers are still difficult from a conceptual standpoint, while resizing a paragraph and preventing page breaks are easy to conceptualize (but difficult to solve).
Best Answer
A comparison of TeX's capabilities that can be used reasonably efficiently (ignoring the Turing argument as it doesn't really help much) with high-quality craft typography has been discussed by me in the article E-TeX: Guidelines to future TeX extensions. I recently reevaluated the state of affairs at the Boston TeX conference. The final paper is not yet finished (hope it will be in the next TUGboat but a video of the talk is at LaTeX project website). Both talks discuss the TeX capabilities and limitations based on the fact that TeX is a programs that renders its output as a "composer" using algorithms.
TeX is not a graphical system where the composer is essentially sitting in front of the screen. So a comparison between TeX and say MS-Word is a bit missleading as essentially TeX formats do not attempt to cater for this kind of interface (though it would be more or less possible by dropping most of the composing functionality and leave that to the users). But if you are interested in the typography limitations then the above article(s) might be a good start --- and none of these limitations are resolved in other typesetting or deskop publishing systems (with a few exceptions due to internals of the box/glue/penalty model of TeX, e.g., changing parshapes based on position on the page is very difficult in TeX but less so in other systems that either work visually or do not care about the quality of linebreaks and thus can do the par shaping at a different stage).
Update
As of March 2013 the TUGboat paper on E-TeX: Guidelines to Future TeX extension -- revisited is now also available on the project web site.