OK, well after a little more investigative work searching online, it turns out that the camera actually has a DV out port, tucked away where I never noticed it before. So I should be able to connect by Firewire.
Firewire will give you much better performance anyways; while USB may be supported, I've found that it's harder to get it to work, and it has to stream the video to get it over USB.
This model needs a 4 to 6 pin firewire cable. I was a bit stumped when it came to actually downloading content to iMovie, until I realised that the Camcorder must not be set to "PC" as I expected, but rather to playback (Small right arrow). After that, it all worked swimmingly