Well clearly I'm in the ZWave camp. (BTW, could we break this out into its own thread? I'd love to talk home automation in general)

I haven't looked at the alternatives very much, but it seems to me like the two main camps are ZWave and Insteon. Both are designed to be mesh networks, ZWave uses wireless and Insteon combines wireless with powerline. Insteon is also a little different in that all devices can also be controllers (of a sort). I'm actually not sure exactly how that works, but I guess it just means that devices can be the command issuers instead of sending a signal back to a central controller which then sends a signal back out to whatever you're looking to control. I'm still not sure how that gets programmed in Insteon's case, but that's because I've never had any hands on with that technology.

The best performance I've ever had from automation technology was when I simply had a GE remote control and ZWave switches/modules. The response time was instantaneous. The problem was that I was extremely limited in what I was able to do, and I couldn't control anything from other locations. I added in the Vera Lite and this created an occasional lag, but that could be in my head. The initial switch from X10 to ZWave was probably what made me so impressed, since it was such a significant jump in performance.

I do, however, have good news for you. The Vera Lite is capable of controlling X10 products. That means you could do a slow migration to ZWave if you like. You need some extra hardware and some additional setup, but it's possible and plenty of people have done it. There's a decent community of Vera users on their forums (that's a link to the thread about using Vera with X10).

Once you start adding ZWave to your system, you can get devices to handle those things you're mentioning. I'm a little unclear as to how your electric floor heater is powered, but it sounds like it's turned on by a wall switch to a controlled outlet? There's two solutions there. Either get a switch like this to turn the outlet on and off (make sure you're getting that on/off switch and not a dimmer in this situation), or you could replace the outlet with a ZWave outlet (I think the switch is the better option for this situation). I'm pretty sure that switch can handle the load.

Is that floor heater just for comfort or is it the primary source of heat for the room? If it's the latter, you could add a temperature sensor and create a virtual thermostat in Vera, telling it to turn on the floor heater when the sensor detects that heat dropped below a certain range.

Anyway, I'm sorry I didn't really give much comparison of technologies, but I've only had extensive dealings with X10 and ZWave. I made a clean switch from one tech to the other, so I can't speak to the process of migrating, but I'm very happy that I made the move.

The one problem is, as I've been saying in all these discussions, the price (and you clearly have the same problem). I was fortunate because at the time I was looking to switch to ZWave, Radio Shack was getting rid of all their GE automation products. This resulted in an absurd fire sale, the likes of which I hadn't seen since the empeg days I picked up dimmer switches that list for $42, and took them home for about $5 a piece. The same with lamp modules and other stuff. I swapped out all the light switches in my condo at the time for about $40, and had at least one ZWave remote in every room. If I hadn't had that sale, I never would have been able to amass the collection of ZWave devices I have now.

Also, don't get the GE ZWave remotes. They don't really work with Vera