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As far as I understand it (a few days of research here and there), there are two major TeX engines: pdfTeX and XeTeX. pdfTeX is the "standard", having been around since the early 1990s, renders straight to PDF, and improves on some minor formatting issues with original TeX.
XeTeX, on the other hand, also outputs PDF, can use any system font without complication, and can accept Unicode input by default. And yet for some reason it's not the default engine in any of the TeX distributions.
Do I have this right? Why is pdfTeX still the standard? Which do you use?
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PDFLaTeX is faster than XeLaTeX as you've noticed. It also currently has better support for certain advanced microtypographic features. (Margin kerning and the like.) And if you really want to confuse yourself, you could also be considering LuaLaTeX at this point too.
XeTeX (/ˈziːtɛx/ ZEE-tekh or /ˈziːtɛk/; see also Pronouncing and writing "TeX") is a TeX typesetting engine using Unicode and supporting modern font technologies such as OpenType, Graphite and Apple Advanced Typography (AAT).
pdfTeX is included in most modern distributions of LaTeX and ConTeXt (including TeX Live, MacTeX, and MiKTeX) and used as the default TeX engine. The main difference between TeX and pdfTeX is that whereas TeX outputs DVI files, pdfTeX can output PDF files directly.
PdfLatex is a tool that converts Latex sources into PDF. This is specifically very important for researchers, as they use it to publish their findings. It could be installed very easily using Linux terminal, though this seems an annoying task on Windows. Installation commands are given below.
Xetex has many plusses when it gets to advanced font techniques on the ligature and character level (as well as a simple interface to use otf fonts) but on the other hand it has drawbacks when it gets to micro-typography on the page level. That is, in Pdftex (or Pdflatex), it is possible to use the microtype package which gives you a nicer margin and some other features concerning letter kerning and spacing.
Generally, most users of Tex/Latex won’t care much about these features anyway (and well, you can see that in the documents they produce); therefore I think neither side seems to have significantly more momentum; and therefore the standard settings are likely to stay the way they are. (Until in an undefined number of years someone is able to and actually does merge these features…)
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