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Firewire vs. USB....what a debate. Think of Firewire as SCSI on a 6 or 4-conductor cord, and USB as IDE. Firewired devices all have their own smarts to talk to another firewire device. USB depends entirely on the host for brains.
Additionally, USB was intended by Intel (and designed as such) to be ONLY for keyboards and mice, not high-throughput devices like drives, streaming data from AV devices, etc. They wanted to get rid of the PS/2 ports and the lack of hot-plugging capability. It's more of a "party-line" approach to mulitple devices on the same controller all time-sliced. Devices can talk over each other, and if you have a single USB1 device on the line, it can slow down ALL devices on that line.
The command set for USB communication is limited and does not allow for large block transfers as easily as USB. Firewire has all of the SCSI commands in its set. It's a significantly better traffic manager than USB ever could be.
Go spring the $30 for a good 1394 Firewire card. It's worth it. I have an Adaptec DuoConnect that added USB 2 and Firewire to my old (USB1 only) system with one card. Cool gadget.
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