Having spoken last night to a pilot who rented a Cirrus shortly after completing his PPL, I think the aircraft is well within the capabilities of almost all PPL holders. With respect to Pace, who has a wide range of experience in many different aircraft types, I doubt he would have any issue in safely flying one and in a very short time being up to speed on the relevant systems. In fact I would expect that to be a significantly reduced period than a new ppl holder.
I also would expect Pace to be up to speed quickly, there is no doubting his credentials, for the purpose of this discussion it would be interesting to know pace what experience you have on the GNS430's?
And also what experience on Glass?
It would also GEP be interesting to here how many hours your recent PPL contact had to do before renters would let him loose?
Training any PPL to fly a Cirrus VFR is no big deal, turn all the glass off so they are not distracted and a few hours they will flying just fine. If they get the speeds wrong on final and landing they may well stuff it and kill them selves but other than that sticking to strictly VFR they should be fine.
A large proportion of Cirrus Fatal's are VFR into un planned IMC, strangely this has killed roughly the same amount of VFR and IFR qualified pilots.