Looks like it’s finally possible to use Google Docs as a word processor. Until very recently, it was pretty much unusable for any serious editing task because there was no way to make linebreaks and paragraph breaks appear different.
However, you can now edit the CSS of your document, which means you can add
p { margin-top: 1em; }
and have it work like an actual word processor, with Enter adding a paragraph break and Shift-Enter adding a linebreak, and the two looking different.