Yes. It's incredibly frustrating that we can't rely on embedding SVG in HTML. (Last I looked--about 2.5 years ago, admittedly--only Firefox could do it, and only with XHTML.)
You should check out http://raphaeljs.com/ , which basically unifies the SVG API in a cross-browser way. In IE, it translates everything to VML on the fly. You need to transcode your SVG to Raphael's JSON-based format, but it's not hard to do.
http://caniuse.com/#cats=SVG,Summary&statuses=rec,pr,cr,...