I have to jump in here on the Electric Nitro thing.
Nitro is tremendously easier and cheaper in the long run in my opinion. Especially if you have the bug and get into racing and so forth. Electric is almost twice the expense of nitro to race.

Electric requires just as much knowledge if not more than Nitro, Tuning an engine is about the easiest thing in the world to do given that you get something that is known to be reliable such as the T-Maxx. You can get needle settings all day long on this forum and others.
Installing new brushes on a Electric motor? How bout cutting the com? How much is the lathe gonna cost you to cut that com?

Compare that to installing a new piston and sleeve in a nitro engine. No equipment or special tools required other than your basic screw driver to take the back plate and head off.
Piston and sleeves are quite cheap as well.
I must also mention that traxxas has the engine swap program, which is not a bad deal at all. Not sure if they have that for electric motors.

Thats enough already but hey lets take a look at batteries.
First you need a quality batteries, the cheapo $15 packs are crap and wont give much runtime. Especially for a E-maxx you want some 2000's at least. I would go for 3000's.
You don't get much runtime out of one pack so lets say we get 2 packs, uh nah I would say 4 to 6 would be realistic if you really want to run the truck.
With that said, if you are gonna buy good batteries then you need a good charger to keep your batteries in good condition. Well you also need a way to discharge them and need to learn about cycling and such to keep them in good shape.
Oh and don't forget about a speed control, get a cheap one and decide you want to change motors? Well if you want anything hot you will have to get a new speed control.

There is a lot to learn with electric as is now obvious, also a lot of stuff to buy. With that a lot of research on each item you buy.

Oh and did I mention POWER! Uh I don't think anyone can argue that a the little whine of a electric motor can even touch the LOUD, SMOKE POURING GAS Motors of the Nitro class.

I do respect Electric, it has its place and time, however I'm not really one that likes to sit around why my packs charge between runs.
With nitro I just pull up, engine still running and fill er up.

You know we could go deeper here but I think the point has been made.

In closing, Electric is a viable portion of the remote control hobby, however when comparative cost are put down on the table we have to realize that the bottom line to electric is simply efficiency.
Nitro on the other hand is just balls out power.

Dbow