Cloudbreak is the mine in Australia that uses surface miners. I think there may be another, but I can't recall the name right now. The miner doesn't always load the material into the trucks. Sometimes the machine leaves it on the ground and it is loaded out later by loaders.
If the rock is of the right composition and strength, then the surface miners can work well since they can achieve some production. But if the rock is too hard and is not easily handled by the miner's cutting head, they achieve very little, but to run up costs.
A longwall miner and a roadheader are quite different animals. While both can employ a rotating cutter head, the longwall miner can also run a shear to slice the coal from the working face. A longwall machine is semi portable, and is advanced slowly as it works a long cutting face, whereas a road header is a very portable machine that works a small area of the face, usually in ammanner similar to tunneling, or for tunneling itself.