If the text is on it's own layer you can do many things to it, these things include applying effects (gaussian blur or curves adjustments for instance) you can flip the layer in an way shape or form. There are things you can't do however, if you make a typo, you'd have to re-type all your text, you can't just go in & edit that one letter like you can in Word or Photoshop (not 2 programs one would normally associate but that's by the by). You said you wanted to italicise the text, to do that you'd need to make it italic before you deselect the text, this is the same for things like changing the font or font size, editable text is something that is coming in future versions, although wouldn't hold my breath.