It depends on the quality of the prints that you want. There's two types of printers you could get, FDM or SLA.
FDM Printers (Fused deposition modeling) is the type that has a spool of filament that is used to layer the material. It's very cheap to print because of the material and there are lots of materials available. It's the most common type of printer but it's also got the lowest quality, since there's some issues inherent with the concept that makes it difficult to get really great quality out of it. Some FDM printers can use multiple materials in a single print which means you could do some different colors, or you could use a second material as a support structure (PVA is a material that you can print with that dissolves in water). Most FDM printers today can print down to 100 micron layers, which is about the thickness of a sheet of paper. There's also some that have very large build volumes for large objects.
Makerbot isn't a bad printer, but people have been able to get better results with some kits, but that requires a lot of DIY stuff. The current printer I'm interested in is the Robox:
https://www.cel-robox.com/ which is currently shipping its kickstarter rewards. There's a number of improvements on the Robox that interest me--several things that make it easy to use right out of the box, but many things that also should give very high quality prints. It's supposed to be able to print down to 25 micron layers.
SLA printers (stereolithography) is a bit different, instead of a nozzle depositing material, it has a vat that's filled with a UV-curing resin, underneath the vat is either a projector or a motorized laser. Above the vat is a platform that can go up and down. When you print, the platform goes down into the vat until it's right above the bottom surface so that there's a thin layer of resin underneath. The bottom of the vat is transparent and the projector/laser will shine an image of a slice of your 3D model onto the bottom of the vat, which cures a layer of resin. The resin sticks to the bottom of the platform and then after a few seconds once it's cured enough some mechanism helps move the platform back up without the resin coming off and then it goes back down again for the next layer.
This method produces very good quality, 50 microns is pretty standard and the layers can be smoother than what you get with FDM printers. It also doesn't have as much support problems as FDM because the entire layer gets cured at once there can be pretty large overhangs before you need some kind of support structure.
The problems with SLA printers are that they're more expensive, the resin is more expensive (like twice as much), the print volume is usually not very large, and it can't print in multiple materials. SLA printers that are available at the moment are the B9Creator, and the Form1+. They're much easier to understand from a DIY perspective, the number of variables is much less, but for the most part the default settings that they come with aren't as good as you could be getting. People have gotten much much better results using other resins and testing out their settings--main issue is the exposure time, you want it to cure the layer enough but not so much that liquid resin that might be behind the layer also gets cured otherwise you get the underside of the print looking really blobby.
As far as software--if you need sculpting software there's Zbrush, which is definitely the best, the UI isn't that great as a 3D program, but it has all the features you could need and does some pretty amazing stuff. Alternatively there's Mudbox, which is cheaper, but they haven't really been trying to compete with Zbrush in terms of features, it's much much easier to use, but just doesn't have as many features.
