Good luck with Entourage 2008. I'll only use it and support it at work. I won't be upgrading to Office 2008 myself at home. They've taken out the scripting, andI need the scripting, use it quite extensively, so I'm moving to NeoOffice 2.1. Just started working with it last night. Runs faster than previous version on some G4's I have, and runs well on Intel Macs.
Regarding incompatible sites: let the companies know browser compatibility is important to you. It is simply bad customer service not to deliver a web product that isn't compatible with at least the Mozilla browsers, cross platform. I'm not even asking for Safari support, just Mozilla/Firefox. If 25% of the market is using something other than IE, that's a big group of potential customers those institutions are turning away.
Regarding email and an integrated calendar, try Thunderbird with the Lightning Calendar add-on.
Thunderbird:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/releases/2.0b2.html
Lightning:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/
Why I Wish I Could Use Safari (and Other Task-Focused Mac Apps)
Why I Wish I Could Use Safari (and Other Task-Focused Mac Apps)