Take into account that gregtech allows you to more than triple your ore output, and adds a ton of other ways to gather your materials, that, along with the myriad of useful, cheaper recipes for various components. for an example, lets use the supposedly "more expensive" solar panel recipe. in vanilla IC2 you need:
3 Coal for Coal Dust
3 Glass
6 Redstone
3 Sticky resin
5 Copper ore
2 Tin ore
5 Iron ore
8 Cobble Stone
Now, lets look at the gregtech recipe. The main changes are that it requires silicon plates, and a carbon plate. The silicon plates come from silicon, which you get very often as a byproduct of electrolysing more important things. in the worst case, you can get it from sand. so it is essentially free. The carbon plate can now also be made from carbon cells, which are in the same boat as silicon. in the worst case, you can get it from sugar cane or charcoal. so it, to, is essentially free.
Now let's look at the rest of the recipe. this is where the cheaper part comes in. You need two electronic circuits, and a tier one machine hull. The electronic circuits, using the wiremill and assembly machine, require 2 copper, one iron or aluminium, and 2 electrum, plus 2 sticky resin using the centrifuge (incidentally, it can also now be gotten through rubberwood) all of those metals can be gotten at triple ore yield using GT processing. aluminium is gotten as a byproduct of electrolyzing as well,so you could also consider it free, while electrum and copper can be harvested from nether lava, and gold can be gotten through glowstone. The machine hull can be using the traditional machine block, or you could also use 8 aluminium or bronze instead.
So, for a total, using iron recipes, and not counting the other ways of getting the metals, you need:
3 iron ore
1 copper ore
2 sticky resin
1 gold
1 silver
Tell me again which is cheaper? Sure, it is more complex, and requires higher tier machines, but that is what gregtech is all about. It adds a much deeper tech tree than standard IC2. There wouldn't be much point in progression if you could get everything you need off the bat. And you get rewarded with a much better ability to harvest resources, so earlier things become cheaper and easier, as any good tech tree should do. I also recommend that you try actually playing gregtech for a while, you may find you like it more than you thought you would. Some of the people in this thread clearly have never actually tried it.