You can make revisions over and over if you want, and the surface will never become saturated or bogged down. You can also stretch the cloth like canvas over stretcher bars. Or you can mount the cloth on foam core with pins, tape or glue. As with the illustration board surface, you can also paint back into the pastel image with the gesso pumice mixture to introduce a little paint texture. I like using Nu-Pastels on this absorbent surface.
Pastels is usually too dry to use exclusively on most surfaces.
But with the pastel cloth, I usually don't need anything softer. Then I work into the dark with various other colors which are appropriate to the area, like some kind of yellowish ochre or burnt sienna for the shadow flesh colors. You must still be very diligent in glazing over or covering most of the initial block-in, so that you don't end up with a purple painting. Pastel cloth allows you to experiment a lot with texture. I then worked back into the texture with the broad side of the pastel stick.