Why doesn't it allow the Hor and vert dims in addition to the angled ones for the angled line, but it does allow the H and V dims but not the angled dim for selected opposite corners of a rectangle? Is this ok?

If you dimension between the centers of two circles, and to make the dimension you select the two circles, you get the same case as the rectangle.

but if you dimension a construction line between them, you get something different.

It doesn't seem to work at all for dims that are on the sheet instead of inside a view.

Dimensions on a circle seem to work sporadically. If you move the cursor outside of the circle, there is no yellow indicator until you move the cursor over the manipulator.

For anyone keeping score at home, here's a crash:

1. inside a drawing view, draw a circle
2. place a dimension on the circle, and without moving the cursor hit Tab a few times (say 4) and then press the Spacebar
3. this leaves the RMB Lock cursor, so click the RMB
4. crash

SW10 sp0 x64 vista

Here's my question:

Which other CAD package is this a bad imitation of?

I'm guessing this will slow you down instead of being very "rapid". It will leave you looking for what you really meant to do. I don't think there was any reason to add something like this to SolidWorks, unless someone is planning on running SolidWorks only from the keyboard without a mouse. I've never seen this type of functionality, but I'd put money on it that it was included here primarily because it exists somewhere else.

Is there some really obvious value here that I'm missing?