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the users will whine, "it's not Microsoft???"

From my experience, only some of the users will do that... typically the edge users that have to deal with other people that use Microsoft Office. The fact that everyone (in France) has to deal with people using Libreoffice isn't going to annoy anybody but Microsoft because interoperability is just a website away.

I'm pretty sure a government would have the resources to develop a renderer for an open document format,

Or they could just link to the web page: http://webodf.org/

What did you need besides the information available here?
Getting started
HOWTO-wodotexteditor.md

Adding page breaks is on the to do list. Here is technical preview of pagination. Displaying properly is part of that work. Help, code or finances, are welcome to make this work land sooner.

WebODF uses Closure Compiler to do type checking and has lots of unit tests. This rigorous checking is essential if you want to write a serious project in pure JavaScript.

Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org support macros in Python or Javascript. Chances are you already know one of those, so you don't even need to learn a new language.

No, I'm not being paid. I work on a similar project: WebODF. I wrote the post so someone (thank you) would ask me what is in it for me and I could plug this project.

Seriously: my experience is that PDF.js works acceptably for most PDFs I threw at it. That included large PDFs with designer layout and scientific papers. Granted, poppler (okular, evince) is still way faster in rendering, but I enjoy PDF.js because it is good enough and I know the work it took to make it and can see the improvements they are making still. Trying to write a desktop type application in the browser makes one appreciate a good one like PDF.js.

A similar project exists for OpenDocument format. It is called WebODF. It handles texts, spreadsheets and presentations. It's not perfect yet though.

And an office suite in the browser would be nice too.

Single Sourcing is a term in the publishing industry that allows you to repurpose content. To do it you hold the content in small parts and then compose it.
This guys system could be based easily on the single sourcing open source code base.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/
It is designed to run in a browser too.

The end result is a open document format
There is also webODF which loads open documents into the browser and render them using plain html5, javascript and heavy use of css.
http://www.webodf.org/

The 3D aspects of navigating from an Open document to see all its links could be done using the CSS transforms perhaps.

I think his idea is create, and you can choose to see the finsihed docuemtn OR the 3D linsk version. SO best of both world.