How to properly filter a form's data against XSS?
There's a huge issue with your implementation: it's destructive. Let's say a user writes about HTML, uses common comparison symbols or just uses the evil emoticon for despair: &lt;o&gt;. Changing data will make it harder for the user to later edit his post, it might even remove parts of it. Let's respect the user effort of typing into a textarea and hitting 'Save'.

So, what to do about XSS? Well, XSS is not dangerous in your database, it is only dangerous when displayed in a browser. So relax about saving it and worry about displaying it. Default formatters for text fields will use the text format settings to apply filters. Make sure the text formats available for your user are safe. And if you're writing your own formatter, don't forget to filter the output (preferrably by respecting the text format settings).

See https://drupal.org/node/28984 and https://drupal.org/documentation/modules/filter for more on this topic.