I have never been directly involved with lasercutters, but with blade-based cutting plotters for printing film and all that, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
I'd assume that the lasercutter gets fed a planar vector, which basically tells the laser which route to go. For those, there are proprietary formats by corel or adobe, or, or or. But as all that is basically just maths describing the path for our purposes, there are the foundational ones like svg or eps that can be fed to all those programs, with no losses.
So my assumption is that what they wanted to say is that they need a vector based path, and not a pixel based image like an jpg or png.
If that assumption is correct it should not matter in which program you made the vector, as long as you give them a clean eps or svg.
That is at least what I tell all my customers. If they bring me a pixelbased image, there's some work to do to change it into a vector format. Which I gladly do either for money of if the job is big enough, but am reluctant to do for a small job, as it can take some time.
Maybe you can clarify with your cutter shop if an eps file would be good, and if so tinker with inkscape first before shelling out 130 quid or something.
if I have enough spare next payday then I will hopefully be able to get a copy of coreldraw to make up a laser cut design for my own land trains 
Has come on a lot since I took this will get an up to date pic later.
