Making a Pandora's Battey is not complicated at all, just time consuming. You didn't expect Sony to just let you run Emulators and such in the PSP, did you? (yeah, Sony blew it there). It 's troublesome I admit, you NEED a PSP-Phat in order to make a Pandora Battery, so either you buy an old PSP or get a new PSP and buy a Pandora from the internet or have a friend who has an old PSP make one. However, you only need to go through this process just once (unless you brick your PSP...).
So yeah, if you are not willing to go through this process then I recommend not getting the PSP (unless what you really want is play PSP games or/and watch videos...). I mean, a computer/laptop can play emulators and such much better than the PSP.
Don't get me wrong, I love my PSP right now. PS1 games run great, I played Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy VII without any problems, and I am currently playing Brave Fencer Musashi. I have played Super Mario World, Super Mario RPG, Pokemon Crystal, The Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap, Sonic 3 and more without any problems. The hombrew scene is huge with many cool applications like PSP-PDA, PSP-Tube, PSP-IRC, PSP Spread Sheet, etc... and cool homebrew games like Hexaxis (my favorite). Having all of these on-the-go is extremely handy, but I travel a lot so that may have something to do with it!
Anyways, if you want to learn more about the PSP then look around the net. I mostly go to
PSP-Hacks for my PSP needs, and their forums have all the tutorials you would probably need.