Just played around with pickup machines on the Octatrack, a Lyra8 and a feedback chain last night. Pickup machines are basically loopers, you have 8 looper channels with a shared max lenght of just over 4 minutes for 24 bit sound and just under 9 minutes for 12 bit sound. Sampling the loops is fairly easy, you can use a midi controller pedal and do it with your foot if you wish. Amazingly powerful and fun to layer loops, fade them in & out and program different effects to the crossfader. It's such a musical device, easily the best sampler I've tried.
It is. To re-sample and re-shape is in my opinion the best device on earth. I´ve never played that much with the pickup machines because I don´t loop that much live (but I often do it with pre-recorded samples on the single tracks) but I´m sure it works flawless, I have to try one day.