Before I bought that era of VUE I'd want a hecuvadeal; being based on a European car (Opel?), the parts maintenance could be spendy, especially given Saturns aren't built anymore. On the other hand, Saturns made pretty decent toads by most accounts, and your base tow equipment is included with the deal.
As to 4X4, like most other commenters here we wouldn't travel without ours. With our old '84 Pace Arrow we towed an '82 Toyota SR5 4X4 pickup with which few geographics presented boundaries. As a flyfisherman that enjoys hunting high country small stream Brookies, as well as High Desert Bows and Browns, and trevassing Canadian prairies and Rockies, I need the wheels to do it. It also gets me to back woods cemeteries for research and interest, crosses small creeks and bouldered tracks, and navigates logging roads to ghost towns, etc.
Our Beaver tows our Ford Explorer 4X4, "Pearl", that we've had since new in '97. Not as high off the ground as the pickup was, Pearl still pretty much gets us around anywhere. It has a relatively rare air ride system that automatically raises an inch when the engine is started and lowers when stopped (for ease of ingress/egress when parked), raises another inch in 4WD high and another again in 4WD low. Still not as much clearance as the little pickup had though. Yet it proffers a half-way decent ride around town and freeways on pavement.
The little VUE may give better mileage numbers than some others, so that's a consideration for you to check out. At one point we'd thought about a Ford Escape 4X4 Hybrid, but it was smaller than Pearl whose interior is roomier. You don't have to go Jeep to go off road, and some models can have a stark ride on the road (IMHO), but a significant number of BAC members tow them and love them.
Joel