LyX, LaTeX, XeTeX

I had a pleasant surprise yesterday. LyX now has ease of access to your system fonts. In the LyX 2.0 beta releases you can go to Document>Settings>Fonts and tick the box marked Use non-TeX fonts (via XeTeX/LuaTeX). Now you have instant access to all the fonts installed on your system. I can only speak for XeTeX here as I don't fully understand LuaTeX but this feature opens up your text processor to a world that traditionally belongs to conventional word processors - from Wordpad onwards.

I am using LyX on Windows but Mac users have been able to use XeTeX in their TeX frontends for some time.

'What does this all mean?' I hear you cry as once did I. 

From the LyX pages:

XeTeX can use all fonts of the operating system without additional configuring and access font features such as special ligatures and variable font weights.

LyX outputs pdf books like nothing else.