You also should buy Planescape: Torment, even if it's in the bottom of your wishlist. It's a outstanding game.

You are speaking my heart's content.

To the OP: you should play Planescape Torment. You will never forget the excitement, the continuous joy of discovery what this game offers for you all the time!

It may be a "nearly exact" reproduction of the old TOEE campaign module, but I take some exception to the last part of what you said just there. I started playing D&D back in the final days of First Edition (best part of middle school lunch!). Different player groups play tabletop just as differently as people approach the computer RPGs. It's not at all uncommon for folks to play several hours-long sessions of tabletop with zero fighting going on. Your bard and thief can be off info gathering and resupplying while your fighter's training to use a two-handed sword, the mage is researching a new spell, your cleric might be at some temple ritual that will bring him in contact with an NPC that will eventually lead to some encounter your DM has planned for you when the party's 4 levels higher....

I agree with you.
The game is rmeant to be played any way you want.
But in the early days, the game was basically just a set of rules for combat in grid-based dungeons.
If you played Temple of Elemental Evil by the book, you probably wouldn't have had these hours-long stretches of zero combat.
Towns were places to advance the story a little bit and to get your characters outfitted for battle. The majority of the game was a dungeon crawl. Remember the original Pool of Radiance? It was the first D&D cRPG, and all you did was go to Phlan to check to see what the town wanted you to do next. Then you went off into the dungeons to get it done. This happened over and over again, and that's all you did.
That was early D&D. And TOEE is early D&D.

Baldur's gate is modern D&D, where the emphasis is on telling the greatest story you can tell with combat serving as a means to give experience to the players.

There is no reason at all to not get both Baldur's Gate and Torment. In fact, it would be a heinous crime.

Both are great games, doesn't matter which one you play first. Once you're finished, Baldur's Gate 2 should be on GOG, which in my opinion is the best game of all time. So by now you're looking at about 300 hours of fun. If you like the combat system, get Icewind Dale, too. It's light on the roleplaying side of things, but it's still a hugely enjoyable dungeon crawl.

PS:T is all the horror you can eat and then some, but it's really odd horror. Normally, in a horror game the player is afraid of being gruesomely murdered. The main theme of PS:T is, duh, Torment, with death seen as a release. None of your party members are mortal, and you just plain can't die. It's very in-your-face with blood, guts and decay, so that biting off your finger becomes nothing to write home about, then trumps it with existential horror and an assortment of fates worse than death.

Also, while the good ending of PS:T is likely the most epic thing that has ever been written and a definite triumph, it is by no means happy.

Mechanically:

PS:T is the easiest game. Party composition is not a problem, neither is equipping characters, nor combat.

ToEE is the hardest game, being ye olde dungeon crawl based on the most sane incarnation of D&D rules: the system, being quite robust, allows to demand a greater degree of mastery from the player.

Baldur's Gate is an ISO standard epic adventure - which is to say, a game that defined epic adventures for many years to come, being just the right mix of original (to be great) and generic (to allow for imitations).

Buying the dratted ToEE was a huge mistake. The thing drove my computer half-mad, and I've got alerts popping up from every virus protection and malware blocker service I have installed. Even AFTER adding it to the exceptions.

edit:
Ehh, GOG released the updated version roughly an hour after I downloaded mine. Apparently they've already fixed the problem. Derp. Now to re-download the game before I start complaining.

Incidentally, the manual is enormous.