yes, i agree. That question could have a 1000 page book for an answer.
A mic and a mixer doesn't mean much.
Here's my studio:
a load of shure sm58's, 57's, audio technica and other mics.
A 24/4 Mackie mixer
behringer frequency gates (2 units equaling 8 gates)
An array of compressors, eq's, enhancers, blah blah.
A PC with an AMD 3000+ processor, 1.5GB ram, all at 400Mhz bus speed on a Gigabyte board.
180GB Raid hard drive set up.
Magix Audio Studio 2005 software
Delta 10in/10out sound card
An array of other software for multiple uses.
Cd burner.