In order to fully take advantage of the features and power behind X-cart you need to make use of the dynamic PHP store. If you are just using links and buttons to add shopping functionality to your site, then X-cart is total overkill. There are much simpler programs that accomplish basic shopping cart functions, but lack the power and features of X-Cart.
To use X-Cart effectively you will have to get a basic understanding of Smarty code. It's not hard and for someone very familiar with HTML should be a breeze to pick-up.
The HTML catalog is used a myriad of different ways depending on your store requirements. Some stores use it as a catalog for the search engines to spider and thus provide a gateway to your site via search engine results. Other stores use it for a speed increase as the pages do render a little faster than in the PHP store.
I have recently begun funnelling all of my customers to the HTML catalog in an effort to reduce the load on my SQL server and speed up their browsing. I use a couple of CRON scripts to regenerate my store 3 times daily (some with time delays between each page, again to reduce load) so that my store, inventory and out of stock/in stock items are relatively up to date.
Personally I think that editing your index.html by hand manually is backwards unless you have a small catalog and it rarely changes. Then there is no need to regen the store in it's entirety.
E-commerce works best IMHO when the customer stays within a store structure and can easily view their cart total, contents, login areas etc.
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