I still don't own Cineform yet for 24P capture intermediates, and I don't think I will exclusively use only 24P on the HV20. But am I correct in my understanding that if I want to create better looking videos for the web they should always be progressive...correct? So as not to see any of the interlacing artifacts...correct?

With web video being the target, would I be correct in thinking that if I capture interlaced footage with the HV20, then when I'm done editing in Vegas 8, I should save the output file as non-interlaced so that it becomes progressive. My thought here is if I use 60i, I'll edit in Vegas, then output to a progressive intermediate such as the included cineform codec (or another codec perhaps?). And then once I have my progressive output file, then I can encode that to FLASH, WMV, or MOV. Am I thinking rightly on this? Isn't progressive "the" way to always go for web video.

Shout out to Eugenia...being a Vegas user I'm sure you could give some good insight and tips.

am I correct in my understanding that if I want to create better looking videos for the web they should always be progressive...correct? So as not to see any of the interlacing artifacts...correct?
Yes.
With web video being the target, would I be correct in thinking that if I capture interlaced footage with the HV20, then when I'm done editing in Vegas 8, I should save the output file as non-interlaced so that it becomes progressive. My thought here is if I use 60i, I'll edit in Vegas, then output to a progressive intermediate such as the included cineform codec (or another codec perhaps?). And then once I have my progressive output file, then I can encode that to FLASH, WMV, or MOV.
What's the use of an intermediate codec? I have Vegas Movie Studio 6, obviously an inferior product compared to full-featured Vegas. Still, I was able to save my project in both Quicktime and Windows Media, and it was encoded progressively. Before I was saving back to DV-AVI, then encoding with DivX or XVID using external application. Did not work well, I could easily see jaggies despite that I was selecting "deinterlace" in DivX codec; I could not find deinterlacing option for XVID.

The last time I simply did "Save Movie" and selected QuickTime, and everything worked out automatically and the picture was very good, no jaggies, but still pretty sharp. I don't know who does deinterlacing -- Vegas or QuickTime codec, but the result looks much, much better than two-step export into DV-AVI and then into DivX.

Granted, I am using DV, not HDV, but the principles are the same: deinterlace and downconvert, so I suppose that the same out-of-the box export should work for HDV as well. I also used different codecs, because I VMS does not export to Divx/XVID, maybe it can be tweaked, but it does not allow these options as it is. So maybe two-step export to Quicktime would work as well, but why bother if this can be done in one step?