This is a genius feature they just added to Gmail:

Sending word docs back and forth over email sucks- it’s messy, you never know who has the most recent version of the document and the potential for overwriting and losing changes compounds exponentially as more people get involved. Google Docs is a great free service we used with our PR agency to collaborate on press releases. It allowed four of us to revise the verbiage without any questions of who had the latest copy. And it tracks revisions so that you can still get back to an earlier state of the document and see what changes have occurred between each revision.

This new feature in gmail seems to actively scan your attachments to determine if one of them is a word doc and if it is, you get a link to open it as a google doc rather than having to download it. This feature alone is reason enough to get a gmail account if you don’t already have one and should helpful for companies that are forced to deal with inbound word docs.

UPDATE: apparently this isn’t rolled out across all gmail accounts. Not sure why I’m seeing it- leave a comment if you have it in yours.