Well i wouldn't say it's any easier or harder to learn. Just there are a hell of a lot less tutorials for Paint Shop Pro. I was lucky, i got my Photoshop 6.0 off a Pirated CD i bought 2 years ago for $3 US, that came with the latest version of every single Adobe product to date: 3rd Party, After Effects, Dimension, Frame Maker, Gallery Effects, GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, LiveMotion, PageMaker, PageMill, Photo Deluxe, Photoshop, Premiere and Type Manager
Staying on topic, i do believe there are brushes for PaintShopPro, as i'm pretty sure i've seen them on the net. You could possibly hack paint to have tools that use brushes, but that would require progrmaming and hacking knowledge. I'm sure if you could use 'stamps' to act as brushes in paint. Much like how the spray can tool works.
Your options really are to wait till you get a better connection, or find the cheapest version of Photoshop that you can that's Version 7 or higher. You could also download it using a P2P with a resume feature. Which will take some time but if you gradually download it everytime you go online, you'll eventually be able to get it. I've downloaded 70mb before using P2P and a 56k modem and it only took me 3 days.
So good luck with your problem, i sure remember the time when i couldn't get photoshop, and was trying to make GFX with paint ;D