I don’t know either- I’m a life-long guitarist , just picked up a fretless bass a couple of years back and I’m hooked. 4-string up to now- but open-minded.
I need to be cautious not to get so absorbed with the drums hardware that I neglect my bass ambitions. Long, long, long way to go. 
I guess it all depends what you want to do? You could program a few patterns on any drum machine to use as a practice aid or to record with or you could have intricate rhythmic beats. The alesis can do both but its the latter example where the Elektron’s start to shine. If you want to use samples too you can integrate them with a drum machine with the Digitakt, Rytm, Octatrack and to a lesser extent with the Model Samples. The Rytm is the obvious choice as a drum machine and it has analogue sound generation as well as the ability to load samples but the others can do ‘drum machine’ too, just in a sample based way. I guess that’s for you to decide but the Elektron stuff does lean toward the ability to do the complex even though you could use their boxes for simple stuff. It’s horses for courses I guess.
Edit. What I will say is Elektron instruments can suck you in…for hours on end. Time and space get stretched…day turns to night and back to day… I see mine as instruments to be played… that doesn’t mean I have to be tweaking knobs and switching patterns… you can do all that stuff if you want to but you can also programme the box to do all those things for you, freeing you up to do other stuff like play bass lines or guitars or just other keyboard parts, without the backing ever sounding ‘static’
Yes- I’ve made the right easy-entry choice with the SR-18. My appetite is whetted, however.
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