I think Xara Cloud, as it stands today, is intended for making office documents in a team based environment [pie charts and stuff] - and for sharing ideas about web-design, and vector-design, but obviously not participating in the the design process itself for these, because no layers and no tools for this

It may mature, but at the moment the hype outweighs the delivery by a large margin

Of course, it depends what you are expecting - if you are an office worker/team who just wants to put together an information leaflet for distribution in the organisation, or design a simple logo, or sketch out a visual, this might just be the tool; that's a different level of design to websites and animations

I too was miffed at being bounced straight into the trial

Hey, 'create anything you want/need' is almost worthy of the trades description act... except maybe that no sane person would actually believe it, when it comes from marketing, a breed not renowned for being objective.

I'm also amused by the constant use of the word 'awesome' - I've seen some genuinely awesome things in my time, but Xara is not one of them, especially not Xara Cloud - ok it's a buzz-word of the moment, but no substitiute for saying something meaningful, always assuming there is something meaningful to say... and BTW no, I don't 'LOVE' the new SVG feature, it's a given it should be there...