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I'm guessing it's a reference to GlowForge, which can cut based on pictures or drawings on the material itself.

Ah, right, thanks, wasn't aware of that.

And a bunch of the inexpensive Chinese laser cutters, some of which provided a pirated copy of Corel Draw to do your designs in.

CorelDRAW is a vectors graphics program.

I often use Inkscape for text I'm going to laser cut because it does a proper job of creating text outlines compared with Draftsight which manages to bork the text when I run explodetext command.

What I don't understand using a vector graphics program to generate CNC cut items is how do you specify dimensions? CAD files have dimensionality inherent.

How does that aspect work?

The Glowforge will only engrave from a bitmap. You need a vector to do cutting.

AFAIK Ponoko just uses the line widths to indicate cuts vs etching. they provide an Inkscape template but I don't think it's required so long as the line widths are right.

Of the 3, which is your favorite?