Actually, they are the same burners that the manufactures put in SCSI or USB enclosures. Firewire is faster than USB. It may or may not be faster than SCSI, depending on the flavor of SCSI.
Since all macs less than about a year old have Firewire, but not SCSI, most CDR manufacturers are coming out with Firewire drives. There are also some USB drives out there, but they are slower than the firewire drives. SCSI is still the trusted favorite of professionals. But if you have an iMac, which you can't add a SCSI card to, your best bet is firewire.
At work I have an old 9150 server with an external, offbrand SCSI CDR (Yamaha mechanism) that only makes coasters when I screw up. It is solid as a rock. Not very fast, but solid.
Firewire and USB are still going through some growing pains, but in monitoring this forum for the past several months, I have seen many success stories, and many failures.
As far as uses, be sure to buy a drive that is listed on the Retrospect compatibility list (http://www.dantz.com). That way you can use it to back up your drives. A full 10 gb drive would take about 16 disks. But that's better than about 4 million zip or SuperDisk disks.
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