I don't disagree that Designer has some great alignment tools but what you've just described is taking 3 steps to do what should be a simple no step procedure. Illustrator introduced these extended crosshairs in around CS3 or CS4 but I first used this in my first Window's drawing tool that predated even Illustrator.
When using the pen tool and drawing a new object, extending the cursor crosshairs would allows the user to align and place a new point at a position that aligns with some other location in the drawing even with snapping turned off. In the Illustrator version, as the crosshairs align up against another point, that other point highlights a bit to show it is aligned. This is especially helpful when building technical drawings (i.e. electrical schematics, etc.).