DVD and hard-disk consumer camcorders use on-the-fly mpeg2 (some hard drive machines use mpeg4) compression. Mpeg depends on lossy temporal compression -- subsequent frames are stored as the differences from a prior reference frame. Though mpeg is an efficient compression format, it is very processor intensive; good mpeg transcoding (the process of compressing video into mpeg format) requires considerable processing power and multiple analysis passes. As an example, when I transcode edited DV-25 video (DV-25 is the standard used in miniDV), my 3 GHz P4 computer can take up to 24 hours to produce a transcoded mpeg from 2 hours of source video. Though the software that I use produces extremely high-quality transcodes, the resulting DVDs are not of the same quality as the original miniDV video. The reason for that is two-fold: mpeg uses a compression ratio of about 10 or 15 to 1, whereas DV-25 is compressed only 5 to 1 (and non-temporally), and the DVD standard bandwidth is limited to under 10 mbps, whereas DV-25, i.e. miniDV has a bandwidth of 25 mpbs.

Inexpensive consumer camcorders that are hard-drive or DVD based do single-pass, on-the-fly, realtime mpeg transcoding. Add to that the high compression rates involved in mpeg2/4, as well as the bandwidth limitation of DVD, and you wind up with video quality this is very poor compared to miniDV. Note, though, that there are crappy, inexpensive miniDV models out there that, I'm sure, produce video that is just as poor as a hard disk or DVD based camcorder -- video quality is also directly related to the quality of the lens and the camera's electronics. However, a decent miniDV camcorder will produce far, far better video than a consumer DVD or hard drive machine.

Finally, you say you don't want to do much editing. Because mpeg2 is temporally compressed, it is very difficult to do things like transitions, titles and special effects -- you'll be limited, pretty much, to cuts-only edits. I'm not aware of any decent editing package that handles mpeg4, though there may be some out there.

It's hard for me to say what is "good enough" video quality for you -- it's possible that a hard drive or DVD machine might be okay. I'd never consider one for my own use, but I also shoot with a prosumer miniDV camcorder.