Converting my project's requirements to drupal's concepts
I would do it as follows:
Create a vocabulary called 'VCR'
Add each manufacturer as a term, then each VCR category as a child of the manufacturer. So your taxonomy structure would be like this:


LG

FGX
Other Category

Sony

FGX
Some Other Category



Note that while FGX is the same term in both places, it will have a different Term ID.

You would then add this to your content type on the Edit Fields page. Select 'Term Reference' under the 'Field' column and 'Select List' under the 'Widget' column. There are other widget options but I think select list is correct in this case.

You would then proceed to install Views, its a contrib module. It basically allows you to list content in very customised ways. (There is more to it than that when used with Panels, another module that you may need.) Go to /admin/structure/views and enable the view named 'Taxonomy term'. This will allow you to override Drupals' default taxonomy display.

At this point going to /taxonomy/term/[int] (where int is one of the taxonomy terms' id) will display all content tagged with that term. You would use Pathauto and Token to create 'pretty' URL's, I would also recommend Global Redirect whenever aliasing content.

You may need to customise the View a little, because I cant remember offhand if it will list all content, including content that is a child term of the current term by default.

Views will allow you to make blocks listing content, and you can get a little fancy and use the core Statistics module to list the most viewed product. Panels is definitely worth investigating if you have time, but in my opinion keep it used sparingly.

Views also enables you to easily provide RSS feeds that people can subscribe to. I do believe it is possible to do email updates as well but it was a while ago on Drupal 6 and my memory is shocking. I think Simple News was what we used. In as I recall it requires some configuration but you could then send an automated digest every so often. Not exactly what you requested, but it may be possible to do it with Rules as you mentioned.

If you will be doing online sales I think Drupal Commerce would be your best bet though I haven't used it in production nor played with it for about 6 months or more.

As for the PS, I couldn't find any when I started Drupal, but to me the general rule so far has been: If it isn't an object, may be useful for sorting, or categorises anything in the real world then it belongs in a vocabulary as a term.