A casascius coin could be nice but it would only beg more questions from the person you are gifting it to, you would still have to explain that they need to use a service to import the privatekey etc.
I think that letting someone make their own blockchain.info account would be more beneficial. It would give them the opportunity to poke around the site without sending coins to anyone by accident.
Then maybe you could get away with handing them a casascius coin, a bitbill, a paper wallet you have printed out yourself or just send it to their new address which would be easily identified to this new user when logging in to the site.
hmmmm
what base units do casascius coins and bitbills come in? 1? what if I don't want to gift 1, then a paper wallet is the only way?
I don't want to do any handholding on this nor do I want to have them trying to solve a riddle once they figure out there is an exchange rate
"what you have to do is download this program from sourceforge, and then unzip it... you have to find where you saved the file, then open command prompt"
yeah no.
I think I'll just make a blockchain account, sent whatever I want at my discretion and give them the login info.