The canon does have firewire; It is defacto in a minidv camcorder
Tape technology is mature , perhaps "old" but has the best video quality for the money at the lower price range.
While you may find it had to think of tape as a digital recording medium next to HDD or flask card, it is.. once the video is off the tape it is the same as if from HDD
The issue with tape apart from perception of old tech is that transfer is real time and access to clips until they are on PC (or Macs) HDD is linear
Also the DV SVI clips are huge 13Gb /hr
But some of us still like it for quality

and video editing software are "used" to it
One other advantage is that DV AVI ( the format from tape) does not degrade with repetitive effects and rendering ( so -called generational quality loss) as badly ( if at all) as mpeg2 ( from non tape camcorders)
However, if you aim to spend more, The HDD camcorder have quality which is very close to tape but have the advantage of Direct access, to clips, very quick non-real time USB transfer, smaller files and less time to turn to DVD if editing is not desired
As such there are advantages and disadvantages of both.
Lower cost HDD camcorders let the side down with quite poor video quality which may actually have the effect of putting you off using them