Thank you and good bye! I'm no longer Xara's target audience.

[BONES]

A life without Xara leaves a huge gap. But obviously that's the price you have to pay if you switch to a superior OS.

In what way is MacOS superior to any other? Do vendors write suprerior drivers for their hardware? No, Apple write all the drivers and often do a very poor job of it. Is it more configurable for particular needs? No, in fact it is far less configurable than any other OS. Is it more stable? No, not one little bit. IN fact, in my experience it is far more difficult to resolve stability problems that do arise than any other OS.
Overall, Apple provide computers that could, at best, be described as pro-sumer. Anyone who wants to rely on a computer to do anything even remotely challenging to their system would be crazy to buy a Mac, especially in this industry - their graphics drivers are simply appalling for anything but the most basic applications. They thrive on the ignorance and blind loyalty of their user base to perpetuate this myth of superiority. Give me a budget and I will build you a PC that will be superior in every way to a similarly priced Mac.

I'd like to see Xara Xtreme succeed, but I too like to succeed. If Xtreme can't venture to the Mac, I may look in seeing who else is out there and then my turn to the dark side would be complete.

You will fail in this endeavour unless, like the OP, you are happy to spend an order of magnitude more money. As he points out, InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator make Xara redundant. What he fails to mention is that as part of Adobe CS4, you will be up for anything up to two grand to replace $250 worth of Xara.
From his description, it sounds like Illustrator would make a great companion to Xara for tracing stuff, I gave it away as a bad joke at v8.0, except that it costs several times more so you tend to want to use it for everything. I would question the value in that, because unless you spend most of your time tracing, you'll save up more than enough time doing other things to offset having to fix up traces manually now and again.

I've already mentioned it in another post: why should I install a superfluous operating system on a stable and reliable system? Even Windoze XP Pro for which I have a licence needs more space on the hard drive than the highly performant OS X.

WinXP takes up 2.3Gb on my HDD. Even though I am running a 64Gb SSD, I find that a perfectly acceptable size for something that does as much as an operating system. I have also only experienced a single OS crash on WinXP, in more than 6 years of use. In more than two years I have never experienced a single crash under Vista on my work PC, which cops far more abuse than my personal workstation. Now, I will concede that Vista takes up far too much disc space for my humble SSD, or I would be using it for sure.

I wouldn't build a shabby Ssangyong engine into a Ferrari - would you?

You'll find most Ssangyongs run Mercedes engines, as they were formerly owned by Daimler, which is a perfect illustration of the kind of ignorance upon which most base their decision to buy a Mac.
In any event, there is not so much as a single component in a Mac that is not also available for any PC user. OTOH, there are almost limitless PC configurations unavailable to a Mac user. I'd suggest a more apt analogy would be why buy a Ferrari if all you are going to use it for is commuting to the office? To take it step further, I'd liken Windoze to a Bentley Continental GT - all the driving pleasure, speed, performance and style of a sports car but if you need to pick the kids up from school or put a week's worth of groceries in the boot, you can do that. The price you pay is a bit of extra weight but it's more than offset by what's under the bonnet.