I use a SD media camcorder (records the same type of information, except for on an SD card instead of a hard drive) that records HD footage at 1080p (in a 1080i container - it's a canon thing, I can't explain it) in AVCHD @ 17mbps (so mine is a bit older, and the newer ones record at a good deal higher bit rate) - I find the picture quality very nice out of my camera. Space requirement on a HD is huge, and you need to use an external hard drive (with in your case a macbook pro - which you might want to correct your specs, what you have is not a G5, you have an intel based Macbook Pro reading your specs).
FCP handles AVCHD footage (whether from a hard drive based camera or an SD card based camera) by log and transfer, where it will convert the footage to a more edit friendly container (since FCP doesn't edit AVCHD natively) - that container being ProRES 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 or AIC (all depending on your settings - most people that use FCP use ProRES as AIC has some limitations). Once converted it can take between 5-10x the space (possibly more with 4:4:4 - I don't know I have FCP6 which doesn't do 4:4:4) as the original footage stored.
In terms of which camcorder is good? Personally, I'm a fan of Canons and Sonys (although I am not terribly fond of the Sony Memory Stick based cameras), but that's just me
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Yes, hard drives offer a lot more record time compared to a single 16GB SD card, but it's a lot more fragile, and if the HD dies for whatever reason (heads crash, click of death, etc.) your out your camcorder - if an SD card wears out (which it will but it takes a long time - they are usually rated for each memory cell, having the ability to have 100,000 - 1,000,000 write cycles, and there are a lot of cells in a 16GB SD card) you can just go to a walmart or best buy and buy another SD card and go back to shooting.
But if you're dead set on a HDD based camcorder, I'd suggest looking thru these:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?ci=1871&N=4294548093+4294194757+4294955571
find some models that interest you (size, features, capacity, etc.) then do some searches on google for reviews.
It's really hard to choose a camcorder for someone else - especially when they haven't said what they want to use it for
- for example person A may just want to shoot family stuff where a base camcorder without many aux features may be great. Person B may want to do more advanced shooting and need more manual controls, Person C may want the ability to shoot high speed for high quality slo-mo, and person D may need to have a mic jack so they can hook in an external mic - each set of features brings in different options and price ranges - and this is completely ignoring higher end prosumer or pro models that have manual focus rings, XLR jacks, more settings then you can find on some operating systems, etc.
Figure out what you want from your camcorder, and what features you NEED to have, what you want to have, what would be nice but isn't vital to have - then start shopping to get some models that contain the features you're interested in, then start looking for reviews and/or sample videos from those cameras.