Tom,
Pulse is going to be the easiest going forward for all our releases and actually probably for you handling any and all installs of Eclipse software. It’s a complete provisioning system… so you create a profile (e.g. MyEclipse + Subversion + GUI Designer) and then Pulse “makes that happen” on your computer. Handling all updates, incompatabilities, etc. Right now you can do that with any base profile (Eclipse, MyEclipse, etc.) and then just add any software you want to that profile. You can also share your profiles with team members.
Also as far as the limitation of what’s in the catalog now, come EclipseCon, our announcement of the 1.0 release and all the new features in it will invalid any concern there.