lmanna

Most machines will likely have some quilting designs included, You can purchase additional designs from places like Kimberbell, Designs by Juju, etc. Some places that sell long arm designs even offer machine embroidery formats of their designs. My embroidery machine allows me to do some designing in it - I imagine most others do as well? You can also use embroidery software to design your own patterns. Embroidery software ranges anywhere from free (Inkscape) to expensive.

Yes, you have to use a hoop. You can only quilt in the maximum size hoop available for your machine. You need to rehoop, stabilize, reposition, etc. every time you need to advance the quilt. I've quilted using mine for a few quilt blocks but would never have the patience to do it for a quilt.

I have a "combo" sewing + embroidery machine. Mine is a pfaff creative icon 2. It's quite pricey but I got a very good deal on it due to purchasing a class model + trade-in of my previous machine. I'm new to machine embroidery so I'm not sure if it's a "great" embroidery machine but it is more than good enough for my purposes. I don't ever plan on starting an embroidery business - if I did, I would definitely get a multi-needle emboridery machiine. I do wish I had purchased a separate embroidery machine so that I could sew something else while my machine was embroidering. But I find other ways of multi-tasking. Honestly since my embroidery machine is a single needle I find that I am constantly changing thread colors so I kind of need to pay attention to the embroidery machine - another reason why I would prefer a multi-needle embroidery machine.

Hope this helps.