From my experience with others devices (fw, alarm devices, components programming devices) most of the time it depends on the converter. Only two times (a prog device and a specific alarm device) I really need to stuck with hardware serial.
What I meant was some XG's have included a USB Type-A to USB Mini-B (i may have the terminology slightly off) console cable. When plugged from a mini usb port on the XG to a Windows pc as an example a numbered USB Serial Port gets created in the device manager which can be used as COM4,5,6, etc in a terminal program. Other XG's have included the RJ45 to DB9 serial console cable and lack the mini usb port but still have the type-A usb ports.
