I believe testing has also shown that miniDV tapes have a longer archival life than DVD media (all depending where its stored of course)
ad2478: if you really want to record to hard disk, you could look into the blackmagic intensity card. It would mean you'd have to cart along a full sized computer on all your shoots, but you can record full 1920x1080 footage in 4:2:2 colorspace from the HDMI port on an HV20 or HV30 with it.
Another option would be to use firewire (which means you can get away with using a laptop, much easier to carry around...) and use the Adobe OnLocation software. It comes with the production suite, and I think it might come with just the standalone premiere pro package as well. But it's a VERY useful piece of software, and will get you recording to hard disk...
I would still use tapes with either of these solutions, because then you have a hard copy. Never know when a hard drive could fail, it could very well happen in the middle of a shoot, leaving you no time to make a backup after the fact. It's definitely better to get the tape copy as you shoot. And as everyone has said, tape is cheap. 5 miniDV tapes generally cost no more than $20 or $25 (USD), and in most cases that would be enough to make 2 short films. Each tape is 63 minutes, so there's a lot to work with there.
To put it into perspective, 5 hours of super 8 film stock would cost you roughly $1000 (it would take roughly 85 super 8 cartridges to get 5 hours worth of film) -- and that's just the raw film stock. It would then take you roughly another $1000 to process all of that film, and unless you were going to edit it by hand, another $1000 or so to have it transfered to a digital format for editing (which generally would be miniDV, because it is inexpensive...)
So. $20-25 of miniDV tape, or $3000 of super 8 film for the same end result.. When you look at it from the proper point of view, it's painfully clear how inexpensive miniDV tape really is.
