Here are some facts. Premiere is designed for a dual processor setup, and uses alot of resources for dealing with uncompressed video's. Its built well, but requires alot of computer. Its fairly easy to use though. Literally drag and drop, edit. . .
I personally use ULEAD MEDIA STUDIO PRO 6.0. It has EVERYthing you would need, and is designed for the average user, with some nice high end features. The speed is 10 times better than the premiere. It can handle different video formats better i feel. You should use this over premiere if you have not so good a computer, i.e. less than a gig of ram, and less than 2 gigs of processor.
-Steve