There's Lyx, though I've long found it harder to deal with than straight-up LaTeX.
If you're doing quick small documents, Markdown and Pandoc may well be a better fix for you.
A useful mode for working with LaTeX (or other tagged documents) is to have a build system which watches your source, re-builds it as you edit it, and a viewer which updates as the generated PDF is refreshed.
You can do this with LaTeX, Markdown + Pandoc, or numerous other systems. It's quite powerful.
It would rock harder is someone(tm) implemented a visual version of LaTeX, for small quick documents and for newbie accessibility.