On the topic of hardware, I've been rocking the tenkeyless keyboards for quite a while now and they work better than you might think with Blender. With a simple pie menu for changing views bound to the q key the numpad is pretty extraneous. If you want a good set of pie menus that's premade and ready to roll, Wazou's are pretty good. https://github.com/pitiwazou/Scripts-Blender

I do agree that a 3-button mouse is super necessary, though a Wacom or equivalent tablet is a better bet in the long run (much better for sculpting, concepts and texturing) and less likely to wreck your fingers.