[TeeJay]

When you use a payment gateway, the cards you can accept are determined by your merchant account and not by X-Cart.
For practical use in the UK it is essentila to use a payment gateway due to the fact you mentioned about Switch, Solo and other debit cards.

Basically, when using X-Cart to take the credit card details it is all done by the cart software, but when using a payment gateway, the card detail entry page is on the payment gateway's server and has nothing to do with X-Cart other than passing information back to the cart to let it know whether the transaction was successfull or not.

PS
protx have just today started a new service which allows you to see the batch processing reports which are sent to your merchant account each day, this allows you to easily reconcile your settlement figures on your bank statements (and see how much is going into your bank account).
Much better for cash flow forecasting.