"More fiddly (and expensive) than just using a computer, perhaps, but worth it because of the generally better quality."

Not sure what you mean by your latter sentence there Will - there's no reason why recording to minidisc or a Zoom would inherently give you better quality quality results than recording to a computer.

With the Zoom H2, it would entirely depend on what mic you were using to record to it, and with the minidisc player, well, minidisc as a medium simply doesn't have the same bandwidth extent that you'd get recording to computer at a top-quality audio bitrate.