As one of my other posts indicates, I'm zooming in (sorry) on to purchasing a Zoom MRS 802.

You can get a USB expansion card for about 70-100 pounds which allows 2 way comms between the PC and the 802; I assume the 802 will appear as a removable hard drive device on the PC (I think the other zoom hard disc recorders also accept the USB expansion card)(There are two available, the UIB 001 and UIB002; the latter is faster but otherwise identical so far as I can tell. I'm not sure whether this means the UIB 002 is USB 2 or not, however).

Also, Zoom provide an "Audio File Manager" with the USB board which converts the Zoom internal format to and from "wav" files. If this is anything like as easy as it looks, using the PC as an editor for "complicated" stuff looks very simple (at least in terms of data transfer).

Hopefully I can report back on the Zoom shortly. The USB interface will be a "sometime in the new year" item, I think.