Building solid midi beats took me practice.  Even though I played in bands for years.. Transferring the experience of playing with live drummers, to the piano roll, and step sequencers  and the like was actually a difficult trip... I hear you are not a fan of techno and stuff, but I wouldn't discount a 4 on the floor..  Even with an acoustic kit....  I made track after track with a disco beat until I began to see where on the sequencers the timing and groove were...

Yeah.. the best way really to program drums is with that, "metronomic," disco beat..   than listen to the tunes you love, and use your head to hear the disco beat inside your tunes..  keep that 16th note hi-hat in your mind, and when you program the disco beat on the piano roll, you will be able to see where the beats from your favorite songs go...

I used to practice guitar to a metronome, but I got better results with my timing by listening to more trance music...



Edit = oh and btw, Sonar's step seq, is where its @ 4 wicked beats

For a more natural sounding drum sound I use a Yamaha DD65 as the trigger for Session Drummer. You can play it just like an acoustic drum kit and have the same dynamic range you'd get from a normal drum kit. I also happen to like the Country drum kit built into the DD65 and can add that as an audio track rather than a midi track. It gives me options.
 
Even if you aren't a great drummer you can use it to add fills to make for a more natural sound to a programmed drum section.

@Michael Five... Actually SD3 does allow for multiple outputs. Here is Seth Perlstein of Cakewalk Jedi fame demonstrating how to achieve this using SD3... http://www.cakewalk.com/C...NARU.aspx/Master-Class Actually I'm not sure if that pulls up the actual vid but it points to the Master Class page. Just click Drum Production 1 and 2. It is extremely informative and helped me out immensely. Also many of the techniques will crossover to other drum software. Remember though, as I said, those vids are using an older version of Sonar so the updated methods are displayed in text at the bottom of the screen. Basically if you can't find the menu or whatever that he is showing look at the bottom of the screen and follow the directions. They all work with X1. Cheers.

  There are a couple of videos about using the tools in SONAR you might find interesting here: http://www.cakewalk.com/C...NARU.aspx/Master-Class

You can get a lot of mileage from Session Drummer 3.

Ok, it doesn't have anything like the range of "tweakability" of something like BFD, but you can route individual kit pieces to their own track in Sonar and there are a few add-on packs available which augment the stock sounds.

I'd use this for now, get used to what it can do, how the routing & loading of kit pieces / midi patterns work etc - THEN decide whether or not to go for something a little more esoteric.

BFD Eco is a GREAT intro to the FXpansion range of drum/percussion vsti's, but you'll end up wanting the full BFD2! Trust me on this 

 Jamsticks by Rayzoon

I'm a fan of Jamstix and also Band in a Box for creating realistic drums.  Neither of these are cheap. Jamstix is the least expensive at $100 to start and if you have been struggling to build tracks by hand, or dragging in loops, this will change your entire perspective on creating realistic drum tracks the easy way...... letting the program do it for you.  (all of my drum tracks in the songs on my website are created by one or the other of these 2 programs so have a listen)

I am not a drummer, nor do I want to set around for hours trying to create a drum track that still sounds fake or boring or both. So I bit the proverbial bullet and spent quite a bit of green in the search for better drum tracks that I did not have to spend hours trying to build by hand. After buying and installing Jamstix and learning a little bit about it..... took a few days to really get around inside it..... what a relief it was when it came to building drums that sounded realistic from the sounds to the styles..... 

Shopping:  http://www.rayzoon.com/buy.html

GET THE DEMO AND TRY IT: http://www.rayzoon.com/jamstix3_demo.html

Check them out.... they work. 

Thanks so much guys
So if I understand, for me, Session Drummer would be worthwhile to learn at first? 
Then either BFD or Jamstix would be a reasonable step up from there?
I D/L'ed the Jamstix trial and will get into that. (the demos sound great)
Does BFD have a trial?

Do any of these require hardware for input?

SD3 will get you comfortable with things. Check out the Master Classes as I said and you'll get a hang of setting things up, routing and working with the Step Sequencer. Also learn how to use the Piano Roll View for more intricate stuff after that. I don't think BFD has a demo version (I could be very wrong on that) but if you have fifty bucks on hand snag it before august 31 otherwise the price goes back up to $100 and you probably won't get the Rock Legends kit which makes it far more usable and worthwhile. I have no experience with Jamstix and no you do not need any external hardware to use the programs. However any MIDI controller (like a keyboard, pad device or MIDI drumkit) will trigger things within SD3, BFD or any good drum software but it takes some learning how to map stuff to the controller. Cheers.

My Dr880 drum machine does have pads and MIDI in and out so would that work as an input device if I got a device that would go MIDI to USB to get the signal into Sonar?
Or would I be better off getting a keyboard with MIDI in out and thru so that I could expand to other MIDI instruments after I get the hang of drums?