hm,  no.

Suppose this situation: me and you agree on a context beta version and a pdf reader and you send me your tex file with

1) a png/jpeg image or a pdf file as externalfigure. Then my pdf and your pdf must be the same, and on average the reader will show the same result. Otherwise probably is a bug.

2) a swf. Then my pdf and your pdf must be the same, but probably the reader will not show the same result -- basically only acroread is able to show swf inside a pdf, and it depends to the OS and version

3) a svg image. PDF spec. doesn't support SVG, so we must also agree on the same program to convert the svg into a bitmap or vector image, and this is a problem: as you have seen, the conversion require a bit of experience.

After all, it's not strange if inkscape 0.40 and 0.48 display the same svg in different way --- and the same for the pdfs.

Actually, only an expert user can use inkscape to automatically convert an svg to pdf/png without (appreciable) errors, and this kind of user is also able to install the correct version of inkscape (which is much easier to install under windows then linux,btw). So, if you are creating a svg by tourself, it's better to check that the pdf and png are the same if you want to be sure that your image will be printed/display correctly --- there aren't so many programs that completely support the svg standard.

ConTeXt then helps this kind of expert user because they are able "a priori"  to understand if a svg image is problematic or not .