Item 1. Go for the E80, the internal harddrive and editing facilities it has makes it head and shoulders above the Philips (no HD), that plus you are recording to the harddrive and the burning to the DVD-R - not directly to the disc. It may sound like an extra step, but you will thank it the first time you get a bad blank (it does happen) and you DON'T have to start all over.
Item 2. Check this out
http://www.facetvideo.com/ this will alleviate your second problem at a reasonable cost (there are other solutions at a higher cost, but this works well for me).
Item 3. Define 'stuffs' burned to CD-R????
If you mean VCD's and SVCD's then yes, you will just need another standalone DVD-Player to 'play' them into the E80 just like they were tape (see the above comment about the Hard Drive.. being able to stack up multiple 'like' programs on the HD and them burn them to disc is easier this way if you want to re-arrange the final order of the programs).
If you mean 'raw' MPEG1/2 files.. then you will need to a) transfer them to VCD/SVCD on CD and the go to the pervious step... OTHERWISE...
if you have AVI/Divx files... I suggest you check out the
Liteon LVD-2001 link as a solution for that.. it has allowed me to transfer a large backlog of Divx/MPEG-4 AVI's that I had very cleanly (and quickly, ie. realtime) to DVD-R via the E80
The third option for 'stuffs' could be a PC with a TV-Out card and one of the assorted media players.. but I would only use that as a last resort.