We just upgraded our camcorder to the Canon HV20 and so far it has been living up to the mostly positive reviews it received. It has better low light performance than our previous Sony camcorder (an older model from 2001) and the high def footage has looked very good. My biggest problem with it so far isn't the camera itself, but trying to upload and manipulate the footage on my computer.
I have a fairly recent vintage (early 2006) Gateway XP machine with a 3.0 gHz processor, 2 gigs of RAM, and a Nvidia 7600 GS Video Card with 512mb RAM which is decent. However, the uploading and then processing within video software is very slow at best. I have jumped back and forth between Adobe premiere and the plain vanilla Windows Movie Maker, and for the most part I have had better luck with the novice friendly Movie Maker. I make sure not to run any other programs, but even then the process of encoding and then exporting the video and audio is very slow. I don't have a good baseline to compare it to and since the source material is HDV, it may not be unreasonably slow.
I am holding off on my next computer because I have decided to changeover to Apple now that they can run Windows pretty well with the Intel processors and boot camp. I know they are due to release Leopard later this year and it seems like they will also be offering new hardware (quad core and higher laptops) as well. I am hopeful to finally have a system that will be fast (and stable) for music and a/v production, which (in my experience) the Windows machines haven't been.