Colin, you'll easily be able to see the rings of saturn with almost any scope - and the first time you do it will leave a very big smile on your face
Depending on the size of your scope (apature-wise) and the darkness of your location, you can see some deep space objects (DSOs) such as galaxies and nebulas, but what you see in images isn't what you see through your telescope. They are more like faint light smudges, and unless you know what you are looking for, you can often miss them. If you're interested in astrophotography, thats a whole other thing, but maybe think about dividing your money up into a photography setup. There's a section on ISS for beginner info on this stuff.
Honestly, I think the best starting point is a dobsonian/netwonian scope. Dobsonians are just newtonians with a different style of mount - that being one that sits on the ground with an Alt/Az movement (up/down + left/right). A newtonian is the same type of scope, but without that mount - usually on a equitorial mount. I have an 8 inch newtonian which I got for 375 dollars, and the stuff you can see from that is brilliant and I don't live in the darkest of spots either. They do require a bit more maintenance, but nothing a complete novice like myself can't handle.
It's really, really important and good to do your research but at the same time it can be a bit overwhelleming with the amount of info out there and opinions.
As others have said, go to a get-together and check out other people's scopes and setups and see what suits you best.
In my opinion, don't spend all of your 4 gorillas at once, but rather start with something reasonable and go from there.
And finally, in my experience one of the most important things to start with is a good mount (EQ6) - I got a HEQ5 pro, and although it is a very nice mount, I wish I had the payload capabilities of the EQ6