The latest version of Pandoc can now also read in org mode files http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/releases.html#pandoc-1.12.4-07-may-2014

So perhaps the conversion of Org->Latex is no longer needed.

This is very new. As of now, direct Org->docx conversion does not taken into account any LaTeX-specific markup you may have in your Org file. Also, biblatex citations are not supported.

If you go Org->LaTeX->docx, it all works fine.

Vikas