Review:
Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard vector-graphics software. In addition to providing all the standard vector drawing tools, Illustrator has a number of innovative features like art brushes to emulate traditional painting techniques and beyond, gradient meshes to create 3-D color gradients, transparency support for all objects and masks, editable drop shadows, glows, and live layer effects.
Adobe Illustrator gives strong support to producing graphics for the Web as well. Pixel-preview mode allows pixel-level control while Flash-output lets designers create Flash movies directly from the layer structure.
Finally, the Transparency tool is integrated with Illustrator, other than that it's pretty much the same as 8.0. Although KPT Vector Effects 1.0 doesn't work in 9.0, whichn is pretty weird and not logical. Overall, 9.0 is very slow on an IMac G3 400Mhz, so just use it for the Transparency tool and to save files for web.