First of all, you should be commended for looking at HP Laserjet printers. I don't care what others says about Lexmark or any other brand of laser printer. I'll live and die with HP Laserjets, period. And no, I'm not employed by HP or know Carly Fiorina!
But to answer your post, the ethernet model will give you the flexibility for other computers to print to it, if you're running a network. Sure you could enable print sharing on a computer if you had USB or parallel port, but then you'd have to leave that computer on for others to print from it. It's not worth it. My Laserjet 2100TN rocks and that ethernet capability is fantastic!
Also keep in mind that these ethernet-capable printers also have their own print-servers (JetDirect cards). This means, that a computer can transmit the entire job to the printer. If the job is big, you can add more memory to the printer so that it can offload a larger portion of the job then if connected by any other way.
As for speed, there are some speed differences. With USB, we're looking at a theoretical transfer speed of 12mbps, with ethernet, you can configure the printer with either a 10mbps or 10/100mbps Jet Direct card that will let you transfer the job to the printer a lot faster. For graphics intensive jobs or if you just require heavy duty printing, the ethernet solution would be worht it.
As for the PostScript question, the printer should be able to handle it without any problems and is not dependent on how the printer is connected to the computer. As for your other question regarding PostScript emulation, I simply don't know and perhaps someone else here can help you.
Keep in mind that the ethernet-enabled printer is going to be a little more difficult to setup since it will have to be configured for network operation, but is well worth it. You would have to give it information like IP address, etc.
Good luck!
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