Personally, with the release of Reason 4, I started recommending Reason to my mates and stuff for learning to produce on. The new release is top notch, and it's perfectly possible to make signable choons on it these days, and the lack of VST support means you'll be forced to learn the tools at your disposal, rather than hunting down new plugs everytime you want a new sound - knowledge that will carry over into any other software you decide to pick up later.
Plus Reason is just so damn fun, it's impossible not to get hooked on production after playing with it.