First, do check
www.propellerhead.se and see the features of 2.0, and the upcoming 2.5 (which I have tried).
My producer partner and I use Reason for beatmaking and love it.
It's all virtual and includes mixer, sampler, drum machine, loop machine, synthesizer, reverb, delay etc.
The NN-XT is a bomb for making nice drums...
If you get Reason, hook it up with a MidiKeyboard and the Akai MPD-16...and you're set to go.
Also, you can get tons of refills (Sample CD's in Reason format).
With ReCycle...you can take any loop and make it into a .rx2 file and Reason will adjust it for you in pitch.
With the new ReLoad you're also able to load Akai samples into Reason.
As you can tell, I am very happy with it...