Brent I was/am in the same boat as you. I have always been a PC guy and got a Snow Leopard machine JUST for FCP. I am shocked that you have to transcode consumer camera footage. My Sony shoot AVCHD .MTS files as well.
Sony Vegas Pro and Premiere Pro CS5 both handle it without transcoding and taking up hard drive real estate. And if you have a video card with CUDA cores (Nvidia), Premiere uses the GPU of that card to speed rendering and previews tremendously!
I am very disappointed after all the hype I was fed about FCP 🙂
Tim