Suggested FPGA board
While ambitious goals are nice, my advice is to start smaller.  Much smaller.  The project you are proposing would be difficult for an intermediate FPGA designer, and almost impossible for a beginner.  I'm a big proponent of FPGA's and would like to see you have success-- starting out with such an ambitious project will likely result in much frustration and probably abandoning FPGA design altogether.  

Let me put it in software terms:  This project would be like someone who has never done software writing a complete C compiler-- from scratch.

Start smaller and you'll be much happier.

Edit:  Added stuff below.

That all being said, it is difficult to give a good recommendation for a board.  The reason for this is that any board I'd recommend for someone with no FPGA experience is absolutely not the same board I'd recommend for doing a CPU type project. A beginners board might cost US$50-100, while a board for doing CPU+VGA+Flash_Card+Whatever might be US$1000-2000.  

There is also a huge chance that once you do a couple of simple FPGA designs then you'll change you mind and want to do a different project later on.

My recommendation then is for you to get a simple board in the under US$100 price range first.  Then when you are ready to tackle a larger project you can buy a more expensive board that is close to what you want (whatever that is at the time).

The board I like is this one:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/AES-S6MB-LX9.htm

It's inexpensive, uses a current-generation part, is from a Tier-1 manufacture, and can even do some simple CPU stuff.