bigjohn - how big is the room that they would put it in? Also would this be mostly for HT, or are they heavy music listeners?
Assuming a small to medium sized room, I like Thasp's recommendation of the M2i's front and back, along with the VP100 for the center. Nothing wrong with starting them out on the right foot with a quality set of bookshelf speakers. The sub, receiver, dvd player, and cables are something you can go cheap on without the sound quality suffering so much that they would notice.
Again, this is assuming that they would be putting the M2's into a space that isn't going to be too big for them to handle.
