Yep the flow cells are expensive, but more generally saying the hardware costs $1000 is probably more of a technicality – almost all sales are bigger contracts, with training, support, flow cells, hardware, included.
Also that's great you have some bioinformatics experience, but are you sure it will apply here? I'm very unknowledgeable about this so forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe that traditional machines do short-reads, whereas Nanopore does long-reads, which I believe invalidates many techniques for reconstructing the data, the tools, etc. This might not be something you have to be concerned about depending on the level you're working at, I don't know (maybe this is all "solved" by the time you're doing analysis?).