Hi there!
My friend takes landscape (panoramic) photos for a living down here in the Illawarra area - his website is deekramer.com - feel free to contact him and ask him stuff and tell him Jonathan sent you. Better yet - if your ever down Wollongong way we could hook up and Ill take you out to see his Gallery / meet him.
He has a xpan, noblex etc.
Im not sure you need to start out with a 6x24 camera - ID see how you go with something more like a noblex. That said there are cheaper 624's than the fotoman - There is a chinese version and you can still put your large format lenses - schneider / nikkors etc on them and get amazing results.
Xpans are no longer in production so they are geting $$. There is a version made by fuji (TX-2) which is being made still and is the same product. (japan its fuji TX-2 and ROW it is hasselblad xpan)
If you are going to get serious - sticthing photos doesnt cut it. You can't blow them up large (as apposed to a 6x17/6x24 positive neg) I can assure you there won't be many professional landscape photographers shooting their pano's with digital cameras.
You can't visualise a pano with a digital camera - nothing beats using a pano-wide viewfinder to compose your photo instead of um click, rotate, click rotate - I think that we well composed!
my 3c
Jonathan