I wanted to avoid a long debugging session, so I verified the Kingston SDXC 64GB (model SDX10V/64GB) card was known to work as the Pi SD before I bought it from Amazon. Although I did not exhaustively try every formatting option, I could not get my Pi to boot with the NOOBS download. The Red power LED was lit, but the screen was blank and I could not tell if my new Pi or the SD was the culprit. I finally downloaded a raw Raspian image and wrote it to the SD with the Win32DiskImager tool. The green LED finally started blinking and the installation went smoothly thereafter.
Now I have a working machine with an environment that I am already familiar with. I am thrilled to see so many packages available in the repositories. I did not overclock this rig, but I definitely see the drawback of using a single core processor. I cannot complain about the price, especially since this Pi was a gift, but I would gladly pay another 30% to 50% for a Model C where the extra money was dedicated to a better processor.