Your questions indicate you haven't even been to a local club's star parties. Do so. This will answer many of your questions and put you in a far better position to buy the right scope for you with the right accessories for you. Just because a scope and accessories are right for me is no assurance any of it is right for you. Scopes are too personal.

Also I prefer to think of a scope as an investment. Unlike your car or a can opener, it will be just as useful 50 years from now as it is today.

So my answer to the first question, is it worth it depends on how you look at the scope. The Chinese ones are quite useful but in the can opener way. They do the job and are then discarded. Average optics are fine for the beginner but as you progress you will grow to where they aren't so acceptable. You'll notice they have lower contrast even on a perfect night and on nights of poor seeing the top optics will seem to be much sharper showing much more detail than the average ones. The real difference comes years down the road. The top notch one will have appreciated, sometimes greatly, in value while the average one will have decreased greatly as there are just so many of them. I have two Cave scopes with Alika Herring mirrors. I paid $380 for the 10" f/8 tube assembly from Cave. I've been offered $6000 for that OTA with a signed Alika Herring mirror and seen them go for far more. Top quality optics are very good investments that you don't just look at in the safe deposit box!

So the answer to that question depends on what you want and expect from a scope and the best way to answer that is attend a few star parties and start to get some idea of what you want yourself, right now I doubt you really know.

As to the second question, a Telrad is a type of finder. It has no magnification or light gathering power. It displays a reticle of known size on the sky like a jet fighter pilot's heads up display. Some swear by them, some swear at them. I use one as my only finder on my permanently mounted 14 LX200R but I use that with computer control so rarely use it. It's there for emergencies like one night when the cat walked across my keyboard and managed to resync the mount to a totally wrong piece of sky!

My portable visual scopes, including those two 10" Cave's I mentioned, use both a Telrad and optical (at least 50mm) finders. I have other scopes without a Telrad at all. There are other types of finders that project a reticle on the sky. Most use just a red dot (gunsight) which, to me, is less useful. But others prefer them. Again which type is best for you, only you can answer and only after trying them in a real setting. There's that star party again. The optical finders standard on most scopes are 30mm and just too small for all but the brightest deep sky objects. Most replace them or at least augment them with something else. A Telrad is one, but certainly far from the only, option.

So find a local club and attend a star party or two to find out what you really want. No one can tell you what you want, only what they want or like.

As I keep harping on in my posts, most beginners in our club buy their scopes then attend our star parties. That usually results in what we call "The V-8 moment" when the see other equipment far better suited to them than the one they bought, often but not always, at a lesser cost. Either way it can be a very expensive moment!

http://www.astronomyclubs.com/
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/organizations
http://www.astronomy.com/asy/community/groups/

Rick