Aerofly goes for close to $300.00 and Realflight for about $180.00 both with non-rc controllers that emulate standard RC TX's.

Since good 3D rendering takes a lot of effort, only the top tier sims do a good job at this. FSOne/2 is about the cheapest sim that has a degree of 3D rendering but it is "weak" at this at best...

IMHO sims pay for themselves many times over in reducing training time and letting you practice things you would never do at the airfield.

So "Arm and a leg" is somewhat relative....