I've used pretty much every popular media player/organizer out there since before MP3s (CD player app in the early 90s), and I settled on iTunes as the best long before I ever got a Mac.
But you do not and he does not need it at all. You download a bunch of songs off of AMazon, put a CD in your PC, drag and drop them onto your cd-r in XP and voila you have your music cd. Amazon is extremely easy to use, type name of music or genre find song and click to download which is on a highspeed server, and every song and CD is DRM free and very often you will find entire cd’s for less than 10 dollars and cheaper and individual tracks cheaper than 99 cents as well.
I’ve also used a lot of different programs, and, at the moment, my favorite is WinAmp (though that is subject to change). It does good ripping/burning, has decent library capabilities, and plays well with others.
I’ve found one thing that iTunes does that WinAmp (and others) doesn’t: iTunes will let you send your library or playlist to a standard output file or printer. Most of the others I’ve tried don’t, which is frustrating when I’m trying to standardize artist names, locations, etc. on my PCs. However, I’ve heard that iTunes is being blocked by corporate software programs, so you can’t use it at work. WinAmp and Windows Media doesn’t have this problem, which is a positive.