All Linux installations will format and partition your drive. Many will give you options to influence the process.
AFAIK neither RH nor SuSe come with a Java environment preinstalled. You'll need the Sun version for that.
There's no real difference between distributions as to using Java.
I recommend you stay far away from RH. It's a Man Drake
and like all firebreathing animals best left to its own devices.
SuSe is now owned by Novel, customer service seems to have gone out the window and is now available to people who pay for a support contract (the same is true for RedHat I believe).
Personally I'm partial to Debian based distributions. They tend to be the most stable even if not always having the latest and greatest versions of packages (which is one reason they're more stable, they're not so quick to incorporate packages that haven't been thoroughly tested for stability).
At the moment I run Ubuntu (
http://www.ubuntu.com) on a laptop where it's highly stable. Installation was a breeze, requiring only minor tweaking to get it to work on the hardware (quite a feat on a laptop).