I went ahead and bought this and thought I'd post some thoughts on it.
Cosmetics:
The camera is very nice to look at and hold, very small. Opening the viewfinder makes the battery visible which is odd, though hardly a deal breaker. It's a manual lens cover which looks pretty sturdy and shouldn't break. All the buttons are within easy reach and the touch screen menu system is very easy to use, I'm not sure why they include a stylus, but then I am used to my iPhone. When folk see it for the first time they go 'Wow', which kind of says it all. The camera is black
Ease of use:
Intelligent Auto (IA)? Can be used by a blind, deaf and stupid monkey, though his entertainment mileage from the product may vary. Fully manual is there if you want it though, so far I haven't needed it but it's nice to know it's there. Point and shoot is the order of the day.
Picture Quality:
I've shot in the highest quality available both outside in bright light, early morning, late evening, while walking and in the living room in low light at night when only one or two normal lamps are on.
Image quality outside in daylight is excellent, eliciting a 'wow' from friends who were round last evening and viewed it on my 40" philips plasma. Outside early morning and late evening shots are also very good, with a little grain introduced but no other noise to speak of.
Inside the house at night with normal lamps on the quality reduces from excellent to 'good'. When I say that I mean the picture is perfectly watchable and of a fairly good quality. Noise is only present in the form of some grain but both myself and my wife were more than happy with the images the camcorder took inside the house. In fact, after reading in a few places how poor this camcorder is in low light, I'm actually pleasantly surprised. No skipping frames, no artifacting of any kind, it's just a bit more grain and not as sharp.
Camcorder seems to track movement well, if you pan really fast you can get a warning message but I had to pan deliberately fast to get that to happen.
The Advanced OIS works quite well, smoothing out some shots I took while walking quite fast, I was pleased. Also the optical zoom is superb and again the OIS really helps here (as does a half steady hand!).
Ease of playback/burning/editing:
I have a quad core with 4gb of ram and a 512mb 8800 GT running vista 64 bit. I installed HD Writer AE 1.5 and it seems to work well. Playback is smooth and I burned an AVHCD DVD which played fine on my PS3 and the quality was indistinguishable from playing directly through the PS3 via the SD card (which is a great feature for those of use with a PS3 that has card inputs). I haven't tried editing or converting footage to SD for DVD.
I can stream footage over the wireless network using PS3 Media Server but at the highest quality it pauses every few seconds, which is to be expected giving the huge amounts of data being spat across my wi-fi network. Image quality remains as high as other display methods.
Conclusion:
For our first camcorder I think it's smashing for the price (£300). I think this will complement my Sony A200 DSLR very nicely in getting pictures and video of our new daughter as she grows up.
Hope you like my appraisal of the camcorder, if I come across anything poor that happens to change my current frame of mind, I'll update the thread
Similar Threads 
. If only Panasonic included all retailers for the offer like Sony do. 
....eventuality. i know 'more moving parts' and all that but is that something to really worry about.
Linear Mode
