Yeah, the SoC boards a nice. So much of what you want to do on an FPGA these days requires the use of a processor anyhow, you might as well have an actual hard block instead of a NIOSII or whatever. We use DE1's at my company as the FPGA analog (pun not intended) of a Arduino Uno, for when we want to do a quick test of some part of a design in hardware, or want to stick the device into something but don't want to tie up a high end unit for something trivial.

Be aware that the DE1 has pretty limited resources for somethings. For exmaple, the on-chip memory can get tapped out pretty quickly when doing embedded applications, and it has less I/O and less RAM available off-chip.

Also note that the DE1-SoC actually uses a Cyclone V device, whereas the original DE-1 uses a Cyclone II, a nearly discontinued chip that is a big step down.

Intrigued by FPGA's capabilities, when checking out my classmate's profile http://orangesorter.com/, I started looking into some development kits to learn.

I found great documentation and economical boards starting at $55 available here: http://www.xess.com/store/fpga-boards/

BTW, I also found Scala based hardware construction language Chisel very interesting https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/.