just installed 1 hour ago v0.46 on windows for a test against Illustrator cs for producing clean, print-quality scientific figures. Inkscape was easy to handle and seems to be at least of equal quality in rendering and functionality (at my requirement level) and superior ease-of-use for this kind of task.
(I produce 'raw' figures from Matlab. Inkscape works neatly with pdf files as an input. I haven't managed to edit eps or ai files yet.)

Thank you for this excellent software!

jd

If you want to edit an EPS or AI file, convert them to PDF first. You shouldn't have trouble finding something to convert EPS to PDF, and Adobe Reader can open AI and save it as a PDF.