Hi there -
I'm confused about what it is that your wife thinks she cannot do on a lesser machine. Is it the piecing or the quilting? If it's piecing, you've gotten a lot of responses from folks who have had great success on inexpensive machines. I wonder if it's the quilting she's talking about. Maybe the friend has a machine with a big opening for quilting large quilts and/or a stitch regulator and feels without these, she'd have to send her quilts out to be quilted by a person with a longarm machine. Many people, with all sorts of machines, do that because they prefer not to do the quilting themselves. If your wife's friend has convinced her that without a high end machine, she'd only be able to do half the job (the piecing of the top), that may be where the discouragement is coming from.
I made my first quilts on a $200 Kenmore and they came out just fine. There are many computerized machines, particularly used ones, that are quite reasonable, too. I moved up to one because I needed some of the automatic features due to arthritis. Probably by now, though, most less expensive models have those same things.
Hugs,
Charlotte