I bought a honey bee on ebay. Fixed pitch RTF, opened but not used. I got it about a week ago.
Today I picked up a Trex 450XL deluxe at the LHS. They sell it for a few dollars more than most websites.

The intent of purchasing the honey bee was to see if I wanted to get into this hobby. I can get it off the ground just fine, but trying to trim it to stay still is difficult. I can't say that I've had a "perfect" hover with it yet, but not all of my landings have been hard ones. Anyways, I wanted to see if I liked it. By the looks of today's purchase, I guess it looks like I do. I know my costs will be fairly high, but I'm going to take my time putting it together and pick up the pieces here and there, the radio being last on the list (more time to decide).

I tried using FMS for a simulator, but it really didn't work out as I only have a 4 channel radio to use with it at the moment (great for planes though). I went with Radd's School of Rotary Flight. Just do a google search, you'll find it.

My advice is to buy something cheap knowing that you'll either like it (although not be good at) and have to count it as a loss when you upgrade to something good OR if you can't get into it and it only sounded like a cool thing to do, you can be glad that you didn't sink any major money into it.

This is only from my experience from being a heli pilot for 8 days...