Was wondering if the GV-HD700 unit will allow me ingest to a laptop that does NOT have a firewire input. Seems harder and harder to find new laptops equipped with firewire input.

According to the manual for the recorder the USB is only for reading a memory stick. Video is only available via the Video outputs or the firewire.

Your best bet may be a USB-HDMI capture device to capture from the HDMI output.

The short answer is no. HDMI on a laptop is likely to be out only so it's doubtful you could capture that way.

Most laptops have either a PCMCIA (Cardbus) or an Express Card slot. Some have both.
The solution then is to get one of these:

Firewire 2 Ports PCMCIA 1394 Cardbus Card ESPOW (http://www.espow.com/product_info.php?products_id=1095&currency=GBP&gsc=googleshopping&gclid=COrZpZLsrbUCFWHHtAodojIAdA)

ExpressCard to FireWire 2 Port ESPOW (http://www.espow.com/product_info.php?products_id=349&currency=GBP&gsc=googleshopping&gclid=CK-T0ezrrbUCFW_KtAod8VgAPg)

I have an Express Card one that has 2 x 1394A and 1 x USB2 ports. They are freely available online.

There's a thunderbolt to FireWire adapter if you want to go that way though I don't know how the ingest software handles acquisition over thunderbolt.
Some of the pc manufacturers have chosen to jump on the thunderbolt path together with apple.

I've seen posts that the Firewire to Thunderbolt converters are not working well, or perhaps at all, for video capture from DV cameras/decks. There are some cheap capture devices to accept a composite input and capture through USB, but you get what you pay for. Poor quality, overcompressed video, as USB does not have the bandwidth of Firewire. While many new laptops have an HDMI port, they are OUT only, never for "capture".

If the laptop has an ExpressCard slot (also very rare these days), then you could use a Matrox MXO2 Mini for high-quality analog and HDMI captures (SD or HD), and preview/playback output as well. Works with included stand-alone capture utility or integrated with Premiere Pro.

Unfortunately, without Firewire or ExpressCard slot, not much you can do on a PC laptop. On the Mac side, Thunderbolt is supported by Matrox and BlackMagic capture devices.

Thanks