Oh shite..This is like the biggest disappointment this year.

Could there be a fast routine I could run at the store to test whether it'd work? I'll be bringing my laptop with me so I guess I should at least be able to determine whether the device can be used.

Thanks for the response so far guys.

Scott: Is your lspci -v output similar?

~$ sudo lspci -v

...

08:09.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
  Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 30b2  
  Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 16  
  Memory at d4101000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]  
  Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2  
  Kernel driver in use: ohci1394  
  Kernel modules: ohci1394
...