Wow, thanks for all the replies. Sorry about the delay in getting back to this topic, unfortunately I ended up having some family stuff, and then some work stuff pop up which made it rather a long week.
I'm currently living in the great ol US of A, in San Antonio. Originally I'm from South Africa, by way of the UK. My interests in electronics are currently around automation and mostly for the controllers on my Aquarium. I keep buying pieces of equipment around automation and thinking to myself that these pieces are certainly not built with ease of use, or flexibility in mind. For example the standard interconnect for most aquarium controllers is either serial, or plain old RJ11 based telephone wires. Surely there're smarter, better, and simpler ways to do so... and it's not like they use these 'bus' connections to make items cheaper because the going rate for the bottom of the line ones is upwards of 250 dollars (for the super small one, with no more than a probe for PH, another for Temperature, and 4 plugs to go with the head unit). There is already a controller based on arduino, but it seems to be very very basic, and I'm all for re-inventing the wheel 
This got me thinking that I really want to get into electronics, and maybe, who knows, one day I may get to build a controller that either wouldn't cost an arm and a leg, and may even fit the needs of your average user... oh, and garden / hydroponics control is also on my mind.
Does that help? So far, I'm thinking about trying to get something going that :
- Reads input from a probe
- Displays bits on a LCD
- Works on the network
- Communicates with other boards on a Zigbee, or whatever network
Really all I was hoping to find was a good basics setup for getting into electronics, and that kit seemed to fit the bill at the time. Since then I've done a bunch of reading around soldering irons and have come up with a load of questions around temp, etc... so now I'm not so sure that pack has a good soldering iron? If some of you guys that are a bit more experienced were to buy your friends a get-going pack, what would you get ?