For the uninitiated, what does Text Wrangler provide the interest Macster who admires, absolutely loves, Pages.
Can its practical advantages for the non-geek be stated simply?
Probably none.
I use it to look at HTML - occasionally doing a quick edit. I don't use it for anything related to page layout, which I think is what you're using Pages for, much of the time. It's a text editor - not a layout program or a word processing program.
From Wikipedia's description:
QUOTE
TextWrangler is intended for use by programmers, web designers, and others who read and write source code.