I said this in the previous post:

If you HAVE already purchased a Piccolo Pro, you can downgrade it to a Fixed Pitch version for much less money that you will spend in replacement blades learning on a Pro.

It is true. Buying the parts to make your pro use a fixed pitch head and blades will be cheaper by far than the cost of replacemant blades and collective pitch mechanics that you will break learning on CP. I am not saying that it is impossible to learn on CP. Just very expensive.
I suspect that your nitro buddies will see you struggle with the Piccolo Pro, declare it unflyable and try to get you to buy a nitro heli. These bigger models ARE more stable. But you cannot fly them indoors.
Your experience with planes will help to some degree, in that you are familiar with a transitter box and the behavior of the entire control system. But it does not translate into how to fly a heli. A good sim using your transmitter as the control, or a dummy transmitter box would help with that.
All that I have read and all the experience that the piccolo board members, many of them outstanding RC enthusiasts, have lead to a very clear conclusion. Learn to fly a piccolo on the FP version, and upgrade to CP after you have gone through the worst of the learning curve.
Don't sweat it on the batteries. NiMH will be useable. You will just have a smaller performance envelope. A little more weight. Less duration. But Many, many people have learned using NiCad and NiMH batteries. After you have stick time, then decide if you need better batteries.
From the 'recent post' I refered to above I listed a [link=http://www.ikarus-modellbau.de/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=138982&page=0&view=collap sed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1]few[/link] - [link=http://www.pgoelz.com/piccolo1.html]good[/link] - [link=http://www.dream-models.com/h/flying-index.html]links[/link] that should help get you going. Go read them. The first is to the welcome page on the Ikarus board. On that board you will find posts all centered around the Piccolo. The last is a page discussing how to learn to fly any micro-heli. Go do more reading.
Good luck. Ask questions. Let us know how you do.