HDV native vs AIC transcoding

I'm wondering how AIC looks compared to native HDV and if my experience is correct... or if I messed up somewhere:

I recently tried out a HDV and AVCHD camcorder to see if I was ready to switch to HD. Directly playing the 1080/60i video from the cameras to a 720p projector looked amazing!

Then I imported the footage into iMovie (HANG ON, HANG ON, don't click your back button yet). I wanted to see how easy the 1080 clips would be to work with. I exported the movie at 720 and 1080 (h.264 using light and medium compression -- 25 and 9Mbps). I also played back the 100Mbps 1080i .MOV file.

Playing back the video from a Macbook Pro via Front Row, the video looked good, but lacked the "knock your socks off" HD wonder. It looked slightly better than a 480p DVD. Then I plugged in the cameras and cued up the same clip for an A/B test.

The original HDV played from the camera was sharper than any of the files off of the MacBook Pro. No contest. Its like the difference between an audio CD playing AIFF native and the 256k "CD quality" version.... the original CD really sounds better.

Is this how AIC transcoding is and why FCP's HDV native is such a big feature?