For anyone interested, I made a tutorial for editing AVCHD (h.264) footage shot from either Sony or Panasonic AVCHD camcorders in just about any NLE. It can be done without creating an intermediate codec. Basically the tutorial shows how to use Avisynth > Wax > Frameserver to feed Vegas a workable format to edit. It should also work in Premiere too. You could also convert the AVCHD footage to avi or mpg with Nero Vision, but my method can bypass that.

I posted all about it here:
http://www.pana3ccduser.com/showthread.php?t=15144

I put a link the the video tut a few posts down on the thread.