Yes, Nomad does not include the service mesh, so you need to set up Consul too. Setting up Consul is a little harder than Nomad, but still simple, and Nomad will integrate with it without additional configuration, so it "just works" when it discovers the Consul service.
It took me 2 work days to read the docs, tutorials setup and tests. I had no prior knowledge of Nomad. So I would say it was very easy. Consul is optional, for my use case I did not use/need it.