By the time Panasonic finds it's butt, the ever-evolving combo-cam market will spit out something new. I view the Panasonic as another one of the short lived products that make it's way to the market place, as the market tries to redefine itself. The fact is, the Panasonic form factor is not particularly good and in fact, none of the DSLR/video combo cams is particularly good in terms of ergonomics. The ideal form factor is that of one of the smaller existing palm corders but combined with state of the art optics and still capability. When that happens I may become interested in a combo cam but in the meanwhile my HV20 works just fine and delivers stunning, artifact free video. And the sad fact is that most of the display devices sold to the consumer today are so full of 'processing' that high definition as known today, can only be described as HD Lite.
I was involved in the first demonstration of high definition video with surround sound at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in 1988 or 89...it's been awhile. We used analog HD demo tapes provided by HBO and NHK Japan, running at 30 ips on two inch transports, weighing 800 lbs in the rack, projecting onto a 12' diagonal 16:9 screen using a BARCO Data projector with 9" CRTs. It was stunning. But if you go into any big box store today and look at the hidef displays, or for that matter into the offices of a high end systems integrator that does happen to have a high end home theater display, you'll still see motion artifact ridden video (Blu-Ray sources and to a lesser extent, satellite sources being exceptions).
The enemy today seems to be bandwidth. Bandwidth represents money. The cable and satellite companies want to cram as much down the pipe as possible using as much compression as they can get away with. Likewise the OTA broadcasters steal bandwidth from their main digital channel so they can run community access, 24 hr weather or 50 yo grade B movies.
I could go on...