This is very bad. I write programs that use the scriptability of Pages to assist people in writing. The users often have writing and reading problems and our programs aid the user in the writing process. The fact the your program can not touch any text in the document (Paragraphs, words, characters) is a real showstopper for us. It is hard to recommend Pages for those users (And yes, we have a system wide spelling checker available trough the usual means).

Here is hoping that Apple will fix this. That is bring back the functionality in the scriptable API.