I use hardware - the roland groovebox 505, a tr-909, and some other machines - then on software I'm a fan of cubase SX and reason 3.0 with as many refills as you can muster, as the factory refill is crap. ableton is amazing, but I can't get myself to use it yet. if you wanna fool with some great sound design and have fun try out synth edit -
www.synthedit.com - which is free, and as for trackers, my favourite is renoise,
www.renoise.com. I love it, because you can use VST's in it (aphex twin has used it to make tracks, apparently), but you can do that in madtracker as well -
www.madtracker.org - as of recent. both are free to use and have low registration fees. fruity loops is great, acid is fun for mixing. if you're looking to stay cost concious I'd suggest getting the free rebirth, renoise and some free vst's off of
http://www.kvraudio.com/ . there's a lot of good stuff out there. as for hardware in your computer, I use an maudio audiophile 24/96 and I love that card, the ASIO is great and very low-latency, and it's cheap now, as it's "outdated". it's also nice to have a good external keyboard, such as Radium 61 key or something of that like.
you don't need to be a programmer to use this stuff - just spend some time learning.
there's really a lot of good free stuff out there, and I would suggest being careful about what you buy until you've tried it. Reason is great - but I hated it until 3.0, and I thought I'd wasted my money when I bought it at 2.0. Spend some time seeing what you like, what you want to drop money on. You might find that you're a hadware person, and it's better to direct your money the right way, of course.
i'm fooling with all this right now, and really liking what I'm doing, on average.
good luck!