I'm not an artist, but I'd expect doing graphic design on a 12" screen would suck. You'll also want a crap load of RAM in order to keep large format images in memory while working on them and a decent size hard drive to store all the po^H^H artwork he's going to be generating.

DVD playback is available everywhere but gaming on the Mac is still a worthless proposition. But like you said, you may not want to pay for that anyway.