Sure, vector programs are great. I use Xara Designer Pro, which is a less expensive vector drawing program, but I use it as my primary tool to design maps, and I do this professionally for the game industry. Among the advantages of using vector instead of an image editor like Photoshop are:
1. In an image editing program like Photoshop, you have to preset your pixel dimensions and the overall size at the start of the project, and you cannot easily increase scales without issues. In a vector program pixels aren't even a consideration until you finish the map and export to bitmap format like JPG or PNG - only then are pixels even a part of the process.
2. Vector is generally faster at re-drawing, effects application compared to image editing, which makes the overall process of creating a map faster and less memory intensive for your computer.
3. Fills, while you can fill your drawn shape with colors and color mixes, you can also fill your shapes with photo textures, so that it looks more like a map created in an image editing software (like Photoshop)
4. Vector programs let you create varying width lines. Meaning you could draw a river as a solid line from the coast to it's source, but you can set the line so that it's 4 points width at the start of the line and diminishes to 0 points at the line, meaning the river is wider near the coast and it gets narrower towards it's source - like a real river, that gets more volume of water on it's length. I usually convert the line to a shape, and cut that shape out of the shape of the land. I can apply bevels and make a river appear to erode into the land itself.
5. Labels are much easier to apply, apply to curved lines, change attributes on the fly - you have much more control over your labels than you would in an image editing program. I know people who use Photoshop to create their maps, but then use Illustrator to do all the labels.
6. Rescaling previously created content to larger dimensions is easy to do in vector.
Here's one of my typical maps created in Xara Designer Pro - note how it doesn't look like what you might expect from vector...
GP
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