I decided to spring the extra $50 and get a DE0-Nano. It seems to be popular and looks like a good intro to working with FPGAs. I didn't get the one with the on-chip hard processor both because it seems you really overpay for that capability relative to a separate but equivalently powerful MCU, and I imagine it will just make the learning curve that much steeper, and at this stage in my career I am more into getting results rather than noodling around.
I have DE0-NANO and I have used it in my Master Thesis. Best thing about using Altera for start? Signal-TAP.
You can always implement NIOS II soft-cpu if you need and want to program something in C, but do not expect much from it (it only gets a job done). I have used F version with Scatter-Gatter DMA and it was road through hell. Also lovely Eclipse...
Now I would get SoC version with Ethernet (also "small" version). First it has much more logic inside, different LE, dual-core ARM and programmer for less than 100$? I know someone who buys those and put it inside products
Wish it only had more GPIO...