USB Audio was discussed in depth in the G3/G4/PowerMac forum recently. There is lots of info there to search through. As for that Roland U-8 thing.. I don't know much about it.. But Tascam make a very similar device, the 428. Which works with some success on Macs for audio, but I read that the Midi side of it is not so hot.
However, there have been problems with USB audio on Macs. For starters, you need at least Mac OS 9.0.4 And even then your not garanteed perfect results. Virtually all the USB audio interfaces suffer from playback glitches. But most importantly, they seem to work pretty well for getting audio into a USB equiped Mac. Thats important because there are more and more Macs around that do not have a MiniJack style analogue audio inputs. USB audio out is perhaps not quite as important as virtually all Macs already have an adequate analogue output. However, it's probably worth me mentioning that my Roland UA-30 works pretty well for both playback and recording. USB audio imperfections generally happen on Macs for 2 reasons.. USB audio really eats up bandwidth on the USB buss, especially if you try to squeeze more than 2 channels down it, in either direction. Or even if you try to use Midi on the same buss. The other most important cause of problems, is Apples poor implimentation of USB audio in the OS. In short, USB audio can work on Macs, but it's a little unpredictable right now.
To be honest, you might be better off waiting a short while for the FireWire audio products to come out. These will have no such bandwidth issues, and will be able to run stacks of glitch free audio channels.
Yamaha have some FireWire audio products out soon. Although they refer to it as mLAN technology ("Music Local Area Network" I believe)
www.yamaha.co.jp/english/mLAN/
Metric Halo also have a neat little FireWire audio interface on the way. Although it seems a tad pricey.
www.mhlabs.com/
And also MOTU have their own offering, The 828, which looks to be the best of the bunch.
www.motu.com/english/motuaudio/828/body.html
All of these devices should work with just about all the most popular Audio/recording programs. Hope this helps! Or is at least of some interest..
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