<p>I'm just learning about SVG, and it seems great but I'm not sure about browser support - have people successfully got around this, or is it still too early?</p>

I'd say your best bet is to create the image in whatever format you're most comfortable with, then convert it to SVG with something like ImageMagick.  You could write PostScript by hand or with a library, or directly create the image from simple text/shape primitives using the ImageMagick API.  There's pretty good documentation, and you can call ImageMagick as a COM object (assuming your language has good COM support).