I agree - get a Mac! Seriously.
If he decides that he needs a PC, then - unless you are playing games - almost everything you can buy today is overkill for a 'typical' home user. Just specify a basic machine with half a gig of ram and save him some money.
Anything you buy will be out of date in six months. That's just the way it is. IMHO, the most important thing to make sure it's still useful in two or three years is really after-sales support (this is especially true for the non-techie), but I'll save that soapbox rant for another day...
