Nope. You just gotta get the hang of it, which may take few times drawing with it, but once you do it's almost as if it comes naturally, so it's not something to be worried about.
Ehhhh.... There's cheaper ones, such as Huion or Wacom.
Photoshop is definitely recommended if you intend to get serious about working with art as it's probably the most flexible and customizable art and editing software around, otherwise, Paint tool SAI is a good alternative (albeit not free. I think it's about 80 dollars) for more manga/anime styled drawings, Krita is a very good and free(!!!) program to paint with, and GIMP is just as flexible as Photoshop but... really isn't user friendly and very hard to figure out, so I don't exactly recommend using that one.
Old ones work just as fine, but may lose driver support and updates at some point. Newer ones also have a bit more customizing options iirc, but it doesn't differ all that much. In any case, you'll probably be fine buying either.