The ultimate electronic kit I've seen is the Roland V-drum system.

I don't know if you've ever seen the Roland virtual guitar system, but it's been around for several years and it worked like this:

A hexaphonic pickup with a 6-conductor cable grabs the vibration of each one of the six strings individually. Once upon a time, these would have triggered a MIDI synthesizer, but there was processing delay associated with that, as well as tracking error.

So instead, they now take the raw signal of the string's vibrations and do realtime DSP and computer processing on the sound so that they can do all sorts of interesting things to the sound. Not just synthesizer sounds (although that is possible), but more importantly, they can MODEL the sound so that your guitar can emulate the sound of any other guitar. For example, turn your 6-string into an authentic-sounding 12-string or Nashville-tuned guitar. Or make your electric sound like an acoustic. Or make your Fender sound like a Gibson. It also has models for different types of pickups, bodies, amplifiers and speakers. For instance, you can dial up a hollow body Gretch playing through the bridge pickup into a Marshall stack with Celestion speakers. You can also program alternate tunings, so that you can do nonstandard tunings and open chords (Joni Mitchell used this extensively on a recent tour as I recall). Since all of this is happening in real-time on the real string signal, all of the tracking issues associated with synth-guitar are gone. Everything you do to the string (including scraping the pick along the string) is reproduced faithfully. You can play as fast and as sloppy as you like, and it will all come through (something you can't do with MIDI).

The Roland V-drum system is the logical extension of that concept, just applied to drums. You have these almost-normal looking drum heads which have these little pickups attached to them. They intercept the signal and model it into any kind of drum kit you like. You can mix and match authentic African drums with techno-synth drums, etc. But what makes it great is that it responds like a real drum-head would respond. For instance, you can still use brushes to scrape across the drum head, and it still sounds natural. You can't do brushes with synth drums. Your snare rolls will be perfectly accurate, instead of being glitchy MIDI-interpretations of snare rolls. But at the same time, it'll do pure synth-sample stuff, too, so you can trigger sound effects and even little melodies with drum hits.

I have a friend with one of these kits, and it's pretty darn amazing. Very very fun to mess with, and I'm not even a drummer. There's actually a bunch of sequencing stuff built into the drum system, so he can do this total one-man-band routine with just the kit. Blows me away when he does it, just wild.

Oh, and in case you're worried that these almost-natural drum heads will make too much noise when you are practicing, don't worry. It's very quiet when you're playing, it's not like playing real full-volume drums. If you use headphones, it's quite appropriate for practicing when you live in an apartment or if you don't want to disturb other members of your house. You could, for example, practice with one of these in the next room while your spouse watches television, and you would not disturb her.

Look into it.