Ok, I feel a need to chime in...
I went off to college for awhile in a place that I deemed to be Hell's Icebox. My first semester up there, the fall semester, I heard quite a few people going on at length about how horrible the weather got there in the winter. I was laughing all the way home (100 miles south) at the end of the semester thinking that it was all a joke because we had only gotten about an inch and a half of snow up there. Boy was I ever wrong. I returned the night before the spring semester started to find all of the roads once I turned off the state maintained roads covered in hardpack snow. I also discovered the driveway for the house I was renting had over a foot of snow in it. All the remainder of the winter I did a lot of walking or riding my mountain bike, and a lil testing now and again with my Ranger.
In fresh snow of up to just over a foot, as long as I didn't loose all of my momentum, with mud tires in the rear and ~150 lbs in the bed, my 2wd with an open rear did admirably well. The hardpack and ice covering all of the roads was a different animal, I had virtually zero control, and the result was a $500 ding to a brand new car, plus I had to find someone with a 4x4 mazda pickup to drag me to some place where I could get enough traction to move down the street. More weight helped on the street, but every time it started snowing, the weight killed me by bogging me down. Running the tires at 30psi helped to a degree too, but it still wasn't much.
My second year up there I poked around and ordered a set of V-Bar chains from a company in PA (tirechains.com). Working them over mud tires and tightening them down was a real bear, but the results were spectacular. My lowly 2wd ranger with an open rear was turned into a tank. Cleared roads were not much fun, the noise and vibration, plus the chains didn't grip all that well on clear asphalt. But since most of the roads became snow-covered and stayed that way till they scraped the 6" of ice off the roads in the spring with heavy equipment, it wasn't hard to stay where they shined. The control over being able to start and stop without issue was impressive. For the fun of it one day I decided to try running into an area that wasn't plowed, but was a parking area for the boat launch on the lake in the summer. Plowing through drifts halfway up my doors, I didn't have a problem.
My third year I bought a Bronco II during the onset of winter and fixed it up in a hurry. Even with crappy street tires, it did great. Using the 4x4 when I needed it, I left my Ranger parked except for when I needed to head home or make some other longer excursion. I also tried something different with the Ranger. I bumped the weight to ~200-250 lbs in the bed and ran my summer treads... a set of Sport King ATs. The siping and aggressive pattern coupled with that weight did surprisingly well, much better than the mud tires, but it was only good up to about 2-3" of fluffy stuff, then I started to have trouble forging my way.
Thus, proper tires, weight balance, and driver skill can work wonders. But they are no match for a serious set of chains when the conditions warrant it. Chains are only good for up to around 40 mph tops. I preferred to keep my spurts at that speed to minimum, I usually tried to run around 25 mph, which was just fine on many of the side roads I frequented. Under 10 mph gets a lil bumpy. I have no experience with cable chains.
I did, however, at one point try out my chains on my Bronco II. I put them on the rear to minimize the possibility of damage should a chain break. (if you put them on the front, it is possible to break a chain and tear out your front brake line, not a good thing). They did just fine like that and I didn't have a problem with steering.
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