Will my "gear" be able to handle it??!!
 

I'm getting a HDR-SR1 soon. I have a iMac G5 17" w/Mac OS X (soon leopard). And iLife 06. Can I use my apple to upload footage from the HDD of my future camera to edit in iMovie????

To my knowledge, there is no codec available yet for the Mac to allow playing or editing AVCHD. I don't know about your horsepower, especially if your G5 is the old PowerPC chip. PC folks are having to run dual core CPUs to get glitch-free playback. Of course, the software MPEG players haven't been optimized for AVCHD yet.

I have the last G5 model that came out. With iSight. And 1.9GHz processor.