I have used a very similar technique with drawing splines in Xara and saving them as a .svg then importing them into Blender and using the spin feature to create the 3D mesh. I export as an open path though but the result is much the same. I have also used Xara to create a quick closed shape to bring into Blender for modeling.

Once I needed a bowl of dog food so I created the bowl in a similar fashion to what Gary did, and the dog food needed to have several different shapes so I quickly and roughly drew those in Xara, exported to svg and once I had each svg imported into Blender I converted them to a mesh and started modeling from there.