I'm a college student, I do a lot of video shooting for my school and I own a MiniDV and right now i'm looking a HDD camcorder. The reason is that I don't have time to transfer those tapes into my computer. 
In your case, HDD camcorder seems to be the better choice. It offers you the simplicity of transfering data to your computer, just plug and play so you don't have to mess around with those tapes and stuff.
The video quality is really good too, because HDD camcorder allows you to record DVD-quality (or mpeg-2) video. Once you are done recording, just dump the data into your computer(using USB 2.0 which is faster than firewire connection) and edit it if you wish or burn it to DVD. As a reminder, HDD camcorder records video digitally, so you don't have to deal with tranfering the tapes data into your computer.
Since it records video to mpeg-2 format, it does takes a lot of space of the HDD. For example, 1 hour of video takes up to 4G of your HDD. JVC offers 20G or 30G HDD camcorder and the prices are like 200 dollors different.
If you want to shrink the video into a smaller size, there are tons of software that does that. For me, i'm using Windows Media Encoder, why? simple, it's free. 
If you need further help, please let me know, till then, laters.