I have little experience with other brands, but I am very happy with the Altera DE2 "*D*evelopment and *E*ducation Board". It is an ideal starting point if you have not played around with FPGAs before.
It includes half a dozen different types of memories (SDRAM, SRAM, Flash, SD cards), 7-segment displays, lots of buttons and switches and more I/O than you can shake a stick at. Want to play with IR? Ethernet? VGA? USB? Audio? All these are the sorts of things that students and novices like. :-)
The same applies to the DE2-70 and other big-brother cards to this one.
