Okay, here's my honest review after using both SpinnerChief Elite and SpinChimp heavily for a few days.
To put it simply: SpinChimp blows SpinnerChief Elite out of the water at this point. There really is no comparison. The SCE interface is clunky and does not lend itself to quickly spinning and adding your own synonyms/phrases. SpinChimp is the polar opposite of that: slick interface which lends itself to fast spinning and easily adding synonyms. The parts of speech thing in the thesaurus is awesome and the synonyms it produces are unmatched. I especially like tabbing through and having phrase-level and word-level synonyms. Essentially it's as fast as you can click and produces extremely high quality content if you do it manually. I've also found that just automatically spinning with the chimp works better than even the "magic thesaurus" or whatever in SCE. It produces more deeply spun content that is more unique and about the same level of readability. the Magic thesaurus might make it a tiny bit more readable but it's not worth it because it spins so few phrases!
The scraping in SCE does not compensate for the horrible interface, lackluster support (and I really mean that, took me days to get a simple response) and overpriced nature of the whole deal. I got the christmas deal and I still feel ripped off. I guess this is why they don't have a return policy, huh?
Then there's SpinChimp which has a 30-day money back period so I wasn't worried about just taking it for a spin (no pun intended). It literally took me 5 minutes of using the program to realize it is miles above what SCE does.
The SCE people said that they are coming out with some new version which I'm interested in seeing but if they ask me to pay for an upgrade I'll kindly tell them that their product, service, and business model is about as quality as a Pinto (if you're American you'll get the reference).
In summary: SpinChimp is fast, easy and nice to look at but above all it works. Well. I really mean that. You'll find that you can blaze through deeply spinning a 500 word article so fast it makes TBS look like a joke. SCE is clunky, slow and ugly to look at with a thesaurus that can't hold a candle to SpinChimp's and that's the most important thing at the end of the day.
If you have any sense I'd say stay away from SpinnerChief Elite unless you're a masochist or would like to burn some cash. If they had a return policy or something I'd say try it out but I think it's pretty clear why they don't have one. It has nothing to do with cracking since it calls to the server every time, I think they just genuinely know that after about a week of trying to get it to work like it should and learning all the ins-and-outs, people will just say, "F**k it," and ask for a refund.
SpinChimp is having a sale now too which makes it ~1/2 of the cost of SCE normally. I think I'm going to buy it just because SCE sucks that much.
Note: the one thing SCE has that SC doesn't is a scraper but I think there are MUCH better options for that like Get Article Pro which is sold here and blows SCE out of the water on all counts.
I hope this helps clear up some of the differences and pros and cons. Happy spinning!