I like Apex, but more because I was running CyanogenMod9 on my last device and I got used to the stock Ice Cream Sandwich experience. After that Sense kind of bothered me so Apex allowed me to hide as much of Sense that I could and gave me a ton of customization features that I never got with CM9's Trebuchet launcher. I haven't given Nova launcher a try yet, but I did try Holo Launcher and ADW, and of those I found Apex to be noticeably snappier and with more features. If your EVO is rooted, Apex launcher allows you to drag and drop widgets from your app drawer, which is a vanilla ics feature I was sorely missing as well. The free version has plenty, but if you throw the devs 3.99 you get what scientifically is known as a crapton of features including overlapping widgets and a long list of transition animations. But still. I do miss the HTC Widgets.
Home switcher is a great app, but all you really need to do is go to settings>apps> Find your launcher in the list, select it, then tap Clear Defaults. Once you've done that, hitting the home button will bring up the dialogue to select which launcher you want to use.