Impress.org - Impress Who?

Is Impress a serious application in creating powerpoint-like slides, or is it essentially just a viewer? I was trying to create slides tonight and working with this application is horrendously difficult. Are you kidding me? It is a pain in the ass to format text, move it, or... well, just about anything. If this is what I always had to contend with when creating presentation slides I think I'd opt for an overhead with a transparency and a marker. I think the Writer is a much more useful application, and it works decently. But Impress.... please. They couldn't have been serious in intending this application to be actually used for creating presentation slides. I'm either missing something, or the Impress is missing something. Please offer your suggestions.