Xara has had a topsy turvy time with branding and market placement, this has hampered our success, and the marketing support in the past left a lot to be desired.
Pointers to the merits of Xara can be taken from Corel, if mimicry is the sincerest from of flattery then CD7 (or8) was the biggest compliment to Xara that can be given, Draw copied the whole concept of info bars, transparency tools, anti-aliasing, on-document UI e.g. linear fills, threw away their rollups and even the icons appeared to be very similar to ours.

In terms of desirable features I would say
-Performance, we have probably the fastest software anti-aliasing 2D rendering engine in the world, our redraw is many times faster than CorelDraw for instance
-All of the features are interactive and intuitive, try feathering, colour editing, bevelling, shadowing etc and compare with Illustrator, Fireworks, CorelDraw, and I believe there to be no comparison for usablility and productivity and performance
-Almost all of our stuff has on-document UI, compare with Illustrator, Fireworks, no horrible floating palettes everywhere taking up screen space and obscuring the document, our context sensitive info bar is a big help here
-We are very general in what can be applied to what, try a blend of a bevelled, transparent, shadowed object, CorelDraw won't even consider letting you blend a transparent object!! This is very basic
-We have a number of novel features such as our stretching buttons which is an enormous time saver for graphics designers
-The bevel tool provides very powerful and flexible lighting effects
-Lots of other things of course such as comprehensive and flexible brush stroking system, dynamic smoothing of scaled bitmaps etc etc

Then main aim was to provide a productive, intuitive, and flexible UI, along with a very fast and flexible rendering technology, and I think this has been achieved.

Mark Goodall (biased.... me?)
Xara Ltd