I do cubic panos without any really right stuff. I use an 8mm Sigma fisheye lens, and a Nodal Ninja 3 on a cheap tiny Velbon tripod. So my instinctive answer is "no, you do not need that stuff." But if you're shooting high-resolution photos with large telephoto lenses and bodies, it might be different.
If you just want to stitch together a few shots of a landscape with a wide-to-normal lens, you can probably do that handheld, as long as you have good stitching software, and enough overlap between images.
I shot this pano handheld with a 60mm macro lens. It was 27 shots: three rows of nine images each:
What kind of panos are you planning to shoot?