i agree, you can quilt on a regular sewing machine. many world famous quilt artists do it such as caryl bryer fallert and paula nadlestern.
if you're going to do free motion you'll drop the feed dogs and use a darning foot or if you have a foot that you use to do embroidery on the machine you can use that.
you can either buy stencils and mark your quilt with the design and follow along or you can mark the design onto paper and pin that to the quilt and follow along on those lines.
there's a company called quilting made easy that sells designs already on paper and you just attach it to your quilt.