After creating a sample testcase the difference I see is so obvious that
this must be either a known limitation of the SVG specification itself
or an enhanced feature of Inkscape not supported by other SVG viewers:
none of the not-uniform transformations (e.g. scaling by dragging the
selection handles) of linked or embedded bitmap images are rendered in
other SVG viewers (like Batik 1.7 or Firefox 3.5.3). Will search for
related bug reports...
After creating a sample testcase the difference I see is so obvious that
this must be either a known limitation of the SVG specification itself
or an enhanced feature of Inkscape not supported by other SVG viewers:
none of the not-uniform transformations (e.g. scaling by dragging the
selection handles) of linked or embedded bitmap images are rendered in
other SVG viewers (like Batik 1.7 or Firefox 3.5.3). Will search for
related bug reports...