Took delivery of a camcorder. Did some testing. Most pleased with results.

Shoots 1920x1080, comes with dock and much cabling. Looks like it isn't really happy with panning - probably a result of running it at 60 fields/sec. Running it at full res, but 30 frames/sec seems to be better - not perfect, but much better. Martin suggested that it's the CCD that can't keep up. Quite possible, given the price of the camera; CCDs are expensive, the camera wasn't.

Full res panning/zooming - in fact any kind of movement - creates very jittery results. I found several sets of plans online for building your own steadycam, but I like these best. I'll try to build one at home. If it works out I'll bill for hours/materials.

Editing the video couldn't be easier. The camera produces H.264 video in an mpg container that just works. Mount the device as a volume on your machine, browse volume to the file you want, drag it to desktop, import/move/copy file in to Final Cut/iMovie and you're ready to edit. Haven't tried it on Linux/Windows yet, though I expect it to be just as easy - as long as I can find an editor for those platforms that handles MPEG-4 natively.