Yeah, this eluded me for a while until I discovered Personal Tasks are only exposed on a task report if you make them appear by selecting "Task > Personal equals True"

From this report, I was able to further discover the "personal project" to which these tasks get sent, and was surprised that it mostly looks and acts like any other project, but is automatically filtered from all project reports - unless you make it appear by selecting "Project > Personal equals True"

I don't think there's much difference in hand-crafting a personal "to-do" project vs. using the built-in personal project, outside of the ability to very quickly enter to-dos from Home, and also trust that no Task report is going to accidentally display your personal to-do tasks - only the reports that are intentionally searching for personal tasks.