How do I transfer my data from a HDD to an iMac?

Several days ago, my aging MacBook Pro suddenly died on me. A repair technician I know diagnosed the laptop as having a bad logic board. We assume the MBP's internal hard drive (an aftermarket disk, installed by the same technician only a couple of years ago) is still functional.
I just bought a refurbished late-2012-model 21.5-inch Core i5 iMac. I want to have my technician-friend extract the MBP's hard drive from the laptop, put it in a cheap USB enclosure, and then copy the info from the hard drive onto the new iMac.
SPECIFICS:
MacBook Pro 2,2 (2.33 GHz, aftermarket 500 GB HDD, MacOS 10.6.8)
iMac (late-2012 refurb, 2.9 GHz Core i5, 1 TB HDD, MacOS 10.8)'
These are the specs as I understand them.
I use LaCie's SilverKeeper for backups. My last backup for the MacBook Pro was getting a little old and I wanted to extract the info directly from the laptop's hard drive because there was some recent data on there I really wanted to save.
Is there a technique for copying only certain information over from an old hard drive to the new computer?
I want my e-mail (messages, accounts, passwords, signatures), calendar, address book, notes, iTunes, Safari bookmarks/history/passwords, and FireFox bookmarks/history/passwords all to be transferred over immediately. I have multiple e-mail accounts and social media activities set up and I want to be able to access them right away.
Is there an automated way to do this?

A perplexing notion occurred to me today. A friend who is a technician extracted the hard disk from my (dead) MacBook Pro, and I am getting ready to go pick that one up from him. I will follow the Setup Assistant procedure for that hard disk, transferring the data from the remains of my old MacBook Pro to my new iMac. That will be a no-brainer.
But now there is another concern on my mind.
For years, I have used a 1.25 GHz G4 iMac (an "igloo" iMac) as a part-time workstation and file server. It is sitting on the same table as the new Core i5 iMac. I want to transfer the information off of the old G4 iMac into the new Core i5 iMac as well. (I will be slowly phasing out the "igloo" iMac over time; it still gives my access to old software that I'm not able to replace just yet.) The old G4 "igloo" has USB 2 and FireWire 400 ports. The "new" Core i5 iMac has Thunderbolt, USB 3 and I also have a couple of Thunderbolt-to-FireWire 800 adaptors that I bought with the new iMac.
Even though the old G4 "igloo" will still have some use left in it, I want to transfer over the data to the new Core i5 machine in preparation for the eventual decommissioning of the G4 "igloo". What is the best way fo doing this? Both iMacs will have password-protected user folders, but I never used File Vault.
How do I transfer the old iMac's data over to the new iMac?

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