The tutorial is ok, but I would suggest something a little more spectacular... Search projects on Instructables after popularity, in the same category for ideas.
The problem with this is that there is no Arduino like PIC development board that could sell well, but there are still few choices (well, it was a few years back).
There are:
One thing I know about the beginners that choose Arduino... They are scared of bare metal programming... so the board must provide a bootloader and easy uploading of the firmware....
That is how you get them into PIC programming... then slowly moving them to bare metal.