I'm confused. The XL-2 watchdog pages describe the CCD as having an active area of 960*576 for PAL 16:9 aquisition. Am I right in thinking that this larger image is then resampled to 720*576 before being written to tape or sent to disk so that it conforms to the DV PAL standard?

Yes. Indeed you are right for thinking that!

Cheers for that Chris.