I wouldnt say its preventing it, but its just nowhere near as smooth or desirable as it was in the layers example shown in the tutorial videos.

tvolheinThe only thing that I am concerned about is Take Lanes.  I am so used to layers.  But I don't do a lot of standard comping, so I don't think that this will be a big issue.

If you want to learn take lanes, I suggest this set of video tutorials:
http://www.groove3.com/str/SONAR-X3-Explained.html
It explains the four record modes now available and how they work with comping and take lanes. Reasonably priced at $35 or $15 for a (I believe) one-month all-access pass.
[EDIT] 
Oh, and they explain everything else, too.

Thanks, I've already bought both the Groove3 video packs and started going through them today. Its good to know that they will help me to learn how to use lanes. With the session drummer 3 videos, I was mostly guess working around how to mimic the techniques into lanes. I will practice more with this once I get to that point in the videos.

I just took a look at that first video to make sure I wasn't missing something. I'm really not seeing the big difference between layers and lanes in this context except for the take order (new layers were added on the bottom, and new lanes are now added on the top) which doesn't make anything more difficult, just different.
 
The one thing I anticipated might potentially have been a problem was if newly added step sequencer clips over-wrote or slip-edited the existing clip in T1 where new clips are initially created by default; but they don't, so that's not a problem. This is one of a few special cases in which X3 allows a same-lane clip overlap.