I'd also like to know about your experiences with competing products. OrCAD Layout for Windows is a trademark of OrCAD . If you don't need them now - trust me, you will. This requires good handling of power planes. Good manual edit functions.
Some tools give the PCB designer freedom to muck with the netlist or change connectivity on the fly.
I don't think this is a good idea. Efficient post processing and reports. This includes reasonably fast generation of Gerber files, component placement reports for automated SMT program generation, etc. OrCAD Layout does quite well on this item. Thanks to OrCAD's technical support, I was able to get my first design out in a few days, which is pretty good.