I borrowed a sim and I am sure it saved me *many* crashes before I had a go on a real trainer

The thing that I am sure the sim did not prepare me for was the squirly-ness of my Tower Hobbies trainer on take off. With the sim it was just a case of full power and pull back -seemed pretty easy. With my trainer though it took several attempts and lessons with a friend before I was ready to get it off the ground - I wasn't prepared for the subtle rudder input to keep it going straight long enough for it to get to take off speed.

I think in a way the sim gave me a false sense of 'ok now I'm ready for the real thing', but in many other ways it definitely got me ready for orientation and controlling the plane coming towards you as well as flying away from you.

The other ting that was different was the sim gives you a very narrow field of view. When I started flying for real I was still in this 'mode' and wasn't paying attention to what was around me, and so it took a while to get out of that habbit and look more to each side of where I was flying, which helped a lot on my landing approaches.