You should let you vet know that the printers ship with "starter cartridges" that are lower capacity than the replacements. Buying new ink cartridges might cost $10 more than the new printer, but it'll give him twice as many pages.
You can also still buy parts for these printers as well reasonably cheap. I was able to find a plastic gear that got stripped due to an object falling into the paper tray - cost me about $8 and 20 minutes of repair time and it's good as new.
The average person doesn't print much, but when they do they really need it right now (e.g. boarding passes, legal document to sign, concert tickets, whatever) and having a rock-solid printer that you know just works every time even if you haven't printed in 6 months is great.
Any printing functionality is entirely incidental, especially on inkjets.
If you need something printed urgently, you can guarantee that one of the following will happen: drivers need updating (=> 400MB download, if you can even find the file on the site), drivers don't work, out of ink, clogged nozzles that need cleaning (followed by out of ink), paper jam, file prints landscape instead of portrait, or vice versa, and there's no obvious way to fix this.
Its like mean-time-between-failure, excepts more like chance-of-succeeding: multiply all the probabilities of success at a stage together, you get the total chance of success. It becomes diminishingly small the more screw-ups are possible. Inkjet has two or three more places to fail, so.
When you rarely print, having a laser is better as they can sit a long time and not dry out or gum up like the ink printers.
A valid concern though, it's been shown those MFDs keep junk around in their buffers forever
Pages per dollar means something if you're printing in bulk. Otherwise, its trouble-free-printing-per-dollar. Which may be improved by buying a new printer periodically as a sort of prophylactic maintenance.