Having made my foray into the world of digital video cameras, here are my thoughts on the subject... Note that these are my personal comments. I am not affiliated with any of these products.
Easy to find, easy to use. Lots of useless features for silly fades and digital effects that you don't need as it is better to get clean footage and add effects on your pc later. Don't bother looking for a combo with a camera -- the camera quality is lousy (1 mp or so) and you can take frames off the video of comparable quality if you want crappy pictures. No need for any kind of memory card -- you can fit so little video on it that there's just no point. Take high-quality video onto tape and downgrade the quality on your pc to create mpegs / jpegs to put up on the web. There is no point in a usb connection since you don't want snapshots or low quality video anyway. I have the canon ZR65MC and it's excellent. Note that once you hit ~12-15x zoom it is really hard to keep the camera stable enough to get clean shots, so unless you are getting a tripod or sitting down and propping your arms while you video, there is no point in getting a zoom more powerful than that. I have used my max zoom (20x) for filming while seated with the camera on my lap and the results are phenomenal -- I sat in the top row of an ice-skating arena so my kids wouldn't know I was filming and I still get close-ups.
My Canon does on-the-fly conversion of analog to digital which is a nice touch if you have old video-8 (or other) footage around. I took the old camera (which has RCA out) and hooked it up to the new using an RCA->composite converter. Then I hooked the new to the computer via firewire and streamed my old video 8 straight to HD for editing. (I think my video card has RCA inputs with capture, but I haven't fiddled around with that yet.)
Firewire rocks. I stream in real-time from camera to disk and can even stream in real-time from camera direct to DVD. No need to spend a lot of money on the cable as the signal is lossless digital. Save your money for Monster cables for buying those that carry analog signals (which do attenuate). Tripplite has quality low-cost cables. Make sure you get 4-pin to 6-pin to stream to your pc -- many of these cables are just sold as "firewire" without specifying if they are 4-4 (device-device), 6-6 (pc-pc), or 4-6 (device-pc).
Before you buy your burner, make sure the DVD player will play the format. They all advertise that they do, but check on the web (dvdrhelp.com) because they don't. They are very sentimental to the point that even the brand of media you burn onto actually matters.
I don't understand why the firewire connectors are in the back but what do I know? I'm running a Dell P4/3G + 512M + 120G HD. My burner is a NEC 1100A DVD+RW/CDRW. It's enough power for everything except rendering -- it takes several hours to render and burn a 35 minute DVD. It don't think it's a memory issue -- I had ~100M of free RAM -- I think it's a CPU issue. That said, there may have been some swapping going on -- hard to know since there's constant HD activity for the rendering. Note that this is top-quality DVD -- at that quality, the disk only holds ~1 hour of video. (35 minutes was 2.5G) You really only need 1/2 or even 1/3 of that quality (that's what you are used to watching on the movies you buy) but I wanted to maintain the quality so that the next time I transfer it I maintain the original. You actually want your computer to have a DVD player in addition to your burner (which I don't have yet). This allows you to burn a first cut onto RW media, play it in your player and make sure you like it, then burn it to R media.
I have Roxio Movie Creator, sonic DVD (both came with PC), Pinnacle Studio 8 (came with camera). All work to some degree. S8 is the best for capturing because it detects scene changes automatically during capture and divides your captured video into chapters for you. It is also the best for editing. However, S8 won't burn to DVD+R, only to DVD+RW. (It's supposed to burn to anything your hardware supports, but there is lots of evidence to the contrary -- see the web discussion boards for more info.) The other 2 burn to DVD+R fine but are inferior for editing. Roxio will do scene detection on request after capture. All 3 will take any kind of video file and convert it to any other kind. S8 will create disk content without burning (like an ISO for a CD) so you can do that and then burn it using one of the other pieces of software. It takes a fair amount of time to create all the menus and what have you -- the wizards aren't so good yet -- but that is time well spent as the results are terrific. I took ~50 minutes of video, edited out the garbage, added menus, and produced a 35 minute DVD that is all great content. It took ~1 hour of streaming (10 minutes of fiddling around because it was the first time + ~50 minutes of streaming) + ~3 hours editing time (cutting and adding menus) + another ~3 hours to render and burn. Note that only the editing time requires interaction; the rest you can walk away from. During the streaming I didn't even notice a hit on pc performance; during rendering, it is best to walk away (or do it overnight).
Also, all 3 burn programs into good internet formats -- doing this low-quality stuff is lightening fast.
Unfortunately, while S8 is the best of them in terms of features, etc., it is also extremely unstable. See my comments on this subject on the Studio 8 Discussion Forum.