Yeah, CorelDraw seems great, I haven't tried it.

Xara is my favorite at the moment, the render engine is really fast and has no problem zooming with a high number of items, especially when grouped.
The interface is streamlined and unobtrusive, the overall ease of use easily outweighs it's shortcomings.

I also use illustrator (mainly not by choice) and although it can do impressive amount of stuff and be handy at times, I find it slow, cumbersome and unintuitive.
Functions are less than optimized and often redundant.
I think illustrator's installer is somewhere around 1.5gb!

Marc