The best way in figuring out what TeX is can be realized by deactivating all the advantages of TeX. The idea is to produce documents in the same quality like MS-Word is able to realize. From a technical perspective this is realized with the following commands in the preamble:
\usepackage{times}
\usepackage[none]{hyphenat}
\sloppy
\setlength{\parskip}{1pt}
\setlength{\topskip}{0pt}
These commands are activating the Times font, deactivating the hyphenation, switch off the inter word spacing optimization and deactivating the vertical space optimization. The resulting text will have lots of white gaps in the text and the paragraphs are positioned as they are on the page.
The interesting situation is, that such a setting is not recommended but the output looks ok. That means, graphics and text can be read easily and the only thing which is missing is the additional 1% of typographic quality provided by the TeX engine. If in addition a Times fonts was used the difference to an Abiword generated document is very low.