jimryannz:

...had Pinnacle products for 100+ years and this would be the worst version in my view for freezing.

Have you been shooting video with the iPhone all that time?  100+ years worth of any sort of clips could indeed overwhelm Pinnacle Studio.  At precisely what junctures do you incurr the freezes?

Have you tried other Windows editing products?  Any more stable in the same situations?

jimryannz:

  will just have to try to sort out how to work the iMovie on the iPad.

An iPad2 has far less RAM or processing speed than your i7 PC.  You can wait for the iPad3, but it will cost you plenty to get one with a mere 128GB memory, and RAM may still be only 1GB.   But Apple will be sure that you need to upgrade stuff every year or so anyway, and you can bet the cost will be more than the $120 or so for retreads of ye olde Pinnacle (which may be nearing EOL anyway).

jimryannz:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU  920  @ 2.67GHz, 2793 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical. 8GB RAM, 2 x 1 TB HDD.

That should be enough to edit iPhone video, or even AVCHD at up to 24mbps.  Did the hangs occur when you were doing Montage, multiple effects, or overlays?  How long was the timeline?  Did you insert lots of transitions and title overlays before each finished its background rendering?  One remedy is to let effects background render before proceeding to do more edits.   Another is to turn off background rendering until all basic edits are done.  A third approach is to add render-intensive stuff like transitions only at the tail end.  Intermediate conversion from AVCHD to HDV-MPEG2 can also lighten the load.

By all means, report back on your iPad experiences and how iMovie compares to the Avid Studio app.

Don't dump your i7 machine too soon, though.