Page and Layout Designer is not on the same level at InDesign and QuarkXPress. These are very high end (and very expensive) applications, But P&LD9 does offer a very excellent set of tools for intuitively working with text and page layout design. I think you will be impressed when you try it out.

The best thing to do is download the trial as soon as it is available and try it out. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

@Acorn - No native support for tables but you can set the tabs to create the table text then create the rest of the table design.