1.) Yes, ad-hoc querying is usually easier to do and more powerful on relational databases (although the trend in NoSQL databases seems to go in that direction as well, ArangoDB being one example).
2.) The document based approach doesn't say anything about the degree of data normalization - you can have your data as normalized or denormalized as you want, just as in relational databases. Each row can correspond to one document, the containing table usually corresponds to a 'type' property on the document. Following this approach, building views / queries is about as powerful as it can be in a RDBMS, the trade-off is rather between strictness in forbidding/allowing slow algorithms vs. ease of implementing a first working version.
2.) The document based approach doesn't say anything about the degree of data normalization - you can have your data as normalized or denormalized as you want, just as in relational databases. Each row can correspond to one document, the containing table usually corresponds to a 'type' property on the document. Following this approach, building views / queries is about as powerful as it can be in a RDBMS, the trade-off is rather between strictness in forbidding/allowing slow algorithms vs. ease of implementing a first working version.