I don't have a problem with her saying that buying is always better than renting. For most people, in most situations, buying a moderately priced house in a good neighborhood IS better than renting; this is more of an exaggeration than an outright lie, and it'd be hard for her to work at selling houses if she wasn't completely sold on the concept of home ownership.
She's totally being pushy when she says you should use as much "purchasing power" as possible, but this is just what salespeople do: Doesn't the shoe salesman always suggest a second pair? Doesn't the waitress always offer dessert? Doesn't the car salesman push upgrades? Buy what you can comfortably afford, and nothing more. It isn't important whether she agrees with your decision or not. When my husband and I were engaged and searching for a house, we purposefully bought something small and inexpensive that we could cover on just his salary -- and we were never sorry for that decision. We were young and had lots of "what ifs" in our mind at that time, the biggest ones having to do with future children and my salary: What if I decided I wanted to stay home? What if we had triplets or a special needs child, and me staying home wasn't even a choice? Decide what you're comfortable paying, and refuse to look at houses that're significantly above your comfort level; if you fall in love with a too-high house, you'll always remember what you "could've had".
As several others have said, title insurance is a standard part of the house closing. Similarly, pay for an inspection before you buy. This isn't always required, but a smart homeowner wants to have a professional go through and check out everything before closing. Closing fees are awfully high, and you may be tempted to try to get out of them -- ask the real estate agent and/or the attorney who handles your closing to explain anything about which you're not crystal clear. You can ask the seller to pay a portion of the closing costs; this is a part of your negotiation, just like whether he's leaving the refrigerator or not -- he can say yes or no.
I strongly suggest that you go with a local bank. If you ever have any trouble with the mortgage, it is so much better to be able to walk into the office and get it straightened out. The mortgage on our first house was an absolute nightmare, and the fact that the company was in a far-away state only complicated matters. You never think these things'll happen, but they do. In our case, they put together the whole package, we'd all agreed upon it . . . and literally three days before our closing (which was also five days before our wedding), they discovered that our house was not located in the county they thought, and they raised the interest rate! We hadn't kept the location a secret, but they'd assumed it was in a more populated county. We tried to fight it, but with the wedding and no place to live if this fell through . . . in retrospect, we gave in too quickly. A couple months later, they discovered yet another mistake in the paperwork. They determined that they'd not collected enough downpayment. We said, "Sue us." And they did. They faithfully collected escrow payments from us every month . . . but didn't bother to pay our home owners' insurance and taxes with that money. They were a total and complete nightmare! And what made it more difficult was that we were forced to deal with them over the phone. The house was our first major purchase as a married couple, and we agreed that we would never again finance anything with someone if we couldn't walk into their office anytime we wanted. In our whole married lives, we only ever financed that house plus the first three cars we bought, and now we're at the point that we expect never to borrow again . . . but after that mortgage experience, we did borrow only from local people. We did have a problem with one car payment once; it was a clerical error, and when I went to the bank, it was cleared up (in my favor) in only minutes.