Regarding 24p in PAL countries: HD is not PAL, that's true. The same frame size is consistent across all territories.

However, broadcast rates are not the same. In ex-PAL countries, when your broadcasters adopt broadcast transmission standards, they're going to adopt 50hz to maintain backward compatibility with PAL. In the US, 720p is broadcast as 24, 30, or 60 progressive frames per second. We cannot broadcast 50p, and it's doubtful the televisions could display 50p.

In Europe, they haven't settled on their standard, but it will likely include 720/25p and 720/50p. No provision for broadcasting/displaying 24p or 30p or 60p.

So if Panasonic builds in 24p, you wouldn't be able to display it on any television set. You could edit it and master it and make an HD-DVD of it for ex-NTSC territories, yes, but you couldn't really do anything with it in your own countries.

Regarding frame rates: yes the 50p version will support 25p and 50p, but it will also have several other frame rates, Varicam-style frame rates. Probably at least as slow as 4fps. Those frame rates haven't been specified yet, but we know they're coming.

I was under the impression that most HDTV were frame rate agnostic. I know several of them I have looked at would display either set of frame rates, I assumed it was a pretty much universal thing since HD was neither NTSC or PAL.

Is this not true? Oh well, so much for universalism. We'll probably have a one world currency before we have one video standard...

I had hoped that as well, but since then I've found that the broadcast rates are different, so sets may or may not be universal. But if you're shooting for broadcast (news, making TV commercials, infomercials, etc) only one frame rate will be broadcast in Europe, and it'll be a different frame rate than that which gets broadcast in the US.