For half-a-thousand USD board, the WebPack should do...
A quick distributor search shows the FPGA alone as >$200 a pop in 1-off quantities for the least capable in the 200T line, and available only in high-density BGA packages. $500 USD for a dev board of this caliber is really quite fair (heavily subsidized and/or loss leader is what I suspect), and Digilent's target market for this platform is clearly not the typical hobbyist.
That being said, $500 is not exactly pocket change, and "should do" simply doesn't cut it if the consequences of being wrong means true cost of ownership increases +$3k for an appropriate license.
I'm using Vivado WebPACK version (which does work on Win8 without pratting around with DLLs), but I understand that ISE WebPack does work too. I could test it with ISE if it is important to you.
The big difference between Xilinx Vivado and Altera's Quartus from an FPGA design point of view is that Quartus gives you SignalTap as part of the no-cost version, and Xilinx doesn't. I'm toying with the idea of making a generic SUMP logic analyzer component so I can use that when I get stuck...
Also I don't play with the embedded CPU stuff often, so can't comment on that side of things.
Thanks for the feedback.