Yes, it's all pretty amazing
I seriously considered updating a standalone audio CD recorder but decided for the external soundcard in the same price range instead for the flexibility.
The CD recorder is a good option for high quality if you are just going to record stereo and not multitrack. But for editing, you need to transfer to the pc and rip the CD-RW each time as you describe, which increases the time needed compared to having the wave file there direct ready for editing.
And nowadays it is easy to sync to a midi track and multitrack wave files to the pc for external processing if that's what you want to do.

[This message has been edited by technicsplayer (edited 02-11-2002).]