I used to dislike CM when it was printed on laser printers, but discovered that when it was printed on a Linotype--the Art of Computer Programming books, for instance--it seemed to take on an entirely different character. It looks clean and pretty, rather than spindly.

Clearly that's subjective, and you might hate it no matter the output device. :)

There are nicer typefaces that come with most LaTeX distributions - I particularly Like Charter BT [1].

Also, with XeTex/XeLaTeX, you can use opentype typefaces and it still typesets them far better than a word processor.

1. http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/charter/