Been using it a bit more, so have some further comments. It’s definitely setup to allow for offline work. Basically having a local copy of the repository attached to your working directory means all diffs and reverts could be done without having server access. In my case, this doesn’t matter as I’m running locally, but could be very useful if you wanted to do some work away from server access.
One shortcoming I’ve come across is removing a group of files. Quite often you will delete a file outside Subversion, and then want to remove all the deleted files from version control. With CVS, all you did was do a cvs remove in the directory, and it would schedule all the missing files for removal. Subversion lists the missing files, but I haven’t found a way to tell it with one command to remove all the missing files from version control. I have to do a svn delete on each file. Hopefully I’ll find a way to do this.