[Unsinkable II]

Nice!

[Jimfear]

As many others I'd say go with the DA70, to avoid distortions. And don't worry about the tripod, panoramas can be made hand held quite easily. Though a tripod can come in handy. The article posted earlier had many good points that should give you the info you need.

[Entropy]

My opinions:

If you are doing multirow panoramas, the DA70 might be a great choice for incredible resolution. However doing multirow without a good pano head is a pain in the ass. Hell, multirows in general are a pain.

If you're doing single-row, it will be too narrow in portrait or landscape orientation.

If you have an L-bracket, I have had good experiences with a 50mm lens in portrait orientation.

If you don't have an L-bracket, you'll probably want a 30mm lens or wider for good vertical field of view.

A tripod that lets you rotate around the nodal point makes the stitching task a LOT easier. I've had a lot of situations with software that is supposed to handle handheld panos (Hugin) that simply failed to stitch handheld panos well. (Although I should retry with a newer version.)

However, panos taken with the following configuration have been incredibly easy to stitch:
Acratech leveling head
Ballhead with panning
Kirk sliding rail
L-bracket to achieve portrait orientation

I'll try to link two examples this evening or this weekend.

Oh, and edit: Don't worry much about lens distortions, if you use a good tripod and have good overlap of your shots, software can easily correct for barrel/pincushion and vignetting automatically nowadays. However, in some cases (lots of sky) you may not have enough good control points to measure distortion so you may need to pre-measure the properties for your lens. Easy for primes, not so easy for zooms.