Hi, Jim.
I'm glad you enjoyed the article. Yes indeed, I have been running GB2 on my Pismo 500. I recently upgraded the internal drive to a 100GB Western Digital Scorpio, and that seemed to make a nice speed improvement in overal system performance. I am also now running Tiger.
The Pismo shouldn't have any trouble recording multiple tracks at the same time, as long as there are no real-time effects being applied. I have used my Pismo (and also a Sawtooth G4/400 and a Sawtooth G4/450) to record two guitars at the same time. My setup included each guitar plugged into an amp, with a mic in front of each amp.
On my Pismo and the Sawtooth 400, I used two Audio-Technica ATR20 ($20 each), each plugged into a dual-mono to stereo adapter, and then into the built-in audio input on the Pismo. Then I set up two basic (no effects) recording tracks - one on the Left Channel and one on the Right Channel.
On my brother's Sawtooth 450, we used his M-Audio Mbox and two Shure mics (an SM57 and an SM58) plugged into the Mbox's XLR connectors. When recording in this setup, GarageBand seems to do some pre-buffering before the recording/playback starts - probably to overcome the lag from the USB interface. That threw me off at first because the sound was about 5 or 10 seconds behind the playback head in GarageBand. Watching the screen for visual cues doesn't work well with this setup, but otherwise the recording is flawless. (This setup requires you to turn off monitoring for your recording track, otherwise you get terrible lag.)
When doing any effects, the processors on these Macs seem to get bogged down quick. Guitar amp modeling in GB2 is optimized for the G4 and does not work in realtime on my Pismo. Even still, recording two guitars with the GB2 amps on the G4 would choke it. I'd say record one software-amped guitar at a time unless you've got a fast G4 or better.
For reference, I have used Deck II on a Quadra 840av and also Deck 3.5 on a Wallstreet 300. Without any realtime effects, these setups work great. GarageBand 2 has so many cool features, though, that it is is tough to go back. With the built-in audio on your Mac, the sound chip does all the work, the CPU just has to direct recording to your hard drive. The drive needs to be able to keep up with two mono (or one stereo) audio signal while playing back a few more tracks. With my old Quadra and a fast SCSI hard drive, I could get 4-6 tracks before I had to start bouncing tracks. With GarageBand, the key is to lock tracks that have effects when you want to record some other track. I don't see any way to bounce tracks in GB2, but it shouldn't be a problem on your Pismo unless you get carried away with the number of tracks.
As far as recording multiple inputs with the Pismo, I have only done what I have described above... used to mics to capture two mono tracks. The hard drive should be able to handle more than that if you had a FireWire interface with multiple inputs. The main problem with multitrack recording is your hard drive needs to read the existing tracks from one area of the disk while writing the new recorded track to different areas of the same disk simultaneously. Simply recording multiple tracks should be easier on the drive.
If you intend on recording two mono tracks from the built-in audio and two additional mono tracks from an Mbox, then you're out of luck. GarageBand only allows one type of input at at time. You may have some success by using SoundFlower's 16 channel software interface and then selecting SoundFlower as GarageBand's audio input. If that works for you, I'd like to hear about it.
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