I'll try to answer some of your questions.

It seems to me that all pears trees grow fast; I think you are probably interested in which trees are quickest to give you fruit. Hopefully others will provide their experience on this. Asian pears produce fruit at a younger age, but their fruit is quite different from the buttery fruit of a European pear. The question of when a pear will bear fruit will depend on the variety, the rootstock, planting conditions, how it is pruned and so forth. Generally with fruit trees you are looking at least a couple of years down the line from planting but some pear varieties take longer to set fruit than others.

Fig trees are pretty care free. In zone 7 some people will wrap a fig planted in the ground to help it get through the winter; but I've seen in zone 7 Maryland plenty of productive unwrapped figs. Others keep figs in pots and bring them in in the winter. This is about all you have to do with figs, besides giving them some fertilizer.

Pears are less carefree, though they will handle brutally cold winters without problems and would be planted in the ground, not pots. The main things you will need to do are deal with disease, insect pests and pruning. The worst disease, which unfortunately is quite prevalent in the northeast, is the bacterial disease fire blight. It might be a good idea to get a fire blight resistant tree. Insect pests may involve some spraying, though pears generally require less work in this regard than stone fruit or apples. Pears have a tendency to grow up vertically very quickly; no one wants to pick fruit from a 30' high tree. You might want to look into getting a semi-dwarf tree and will probably need to do some pruning to keep it under control. In general though, of all the standard fruit trees you can grow, pears are the most user friendly.

There are plenty of good nurseries. Check out the website www.nafex.org and their link to nurseries and look at the websites for ones in the north east. I like Fedco's website, as it has lots of information regarding varieties and how to plant etc. I would advise you to purchase a bare root tree to plant in late fall in your area. Note too that pears are typically not self-fertile, that is, you need two different varieties to get fruit. The nursery you buy from should be able to tell you which varieties pollinate which (if they cannot tell you this, that's a good sign not to do business with them). If your neighbors have pear trees, this is probably not a consideration you need worry about. Or, to get more advanced, you could graft a different variety to your tree at a future date (pears are very easy to graft).