Not at all an expert but I believe it's possible to get started experimenting with just a simulated robot in the simulated world model. While the full workflow is to generate training data to drive a real robot in the real world, without closing the loop, you're just lacking the ground truth data to quantify the divergence between simulation and reality.

There are all kinds of hobbyist robotic armatures at various price points but my understanding from a friend in this space is that the precision, durability and repeatability for serious applications starts at around $30,000 to $50,000. He mentioned the Franka Research 3 (FR3) as one example (https://franka.de/), perhaps driven by something like a Jetson AGX Thor ($5,000 and up).

As always, there are many less expensive and DIY-ish recipes to get started on smaller budgets. My friend's suggestion was more the baseline experimental lab system for a big company wanting get started with something that could, in theory, scale to light industrial internal deployment.