Saturn is bringing the astra to the united states, but only in a mild child version, i believe the specs were right around 130hp in the only engine they will be offering. The new Road and Track talks about it, it looks like a decent little hatch, nothing too cool though.
I did read their full review on the C30 and it definitely lost some points in my book... it gets destroyed in terms of performance by the GTI, Si, and Cooper S... They have a cheapy version of the car that sells for like 23k, but with some respectable options the car can top 30k.
Personally, i feel the C30 looked pretty ugly as well.
The new Subaru WRX hatch has a ton of potential for performance... in terms of pure speed... you might call it an R32 killer... drop a thousand bucks into the WRX and the price is still around 25k and can easily put out over 250hp. I believe the AWD system in the WRX is as good if not better than the R32's... however, if someone was so brave to throw a supercharger on their R32 with some decent tuning and you could start blowing the doors off exotic cars...