Laptop Help

Depends what games he plans to play

Find a game that he surely wants to play / interested in and try to buy something according to it's recommended requirements - just pay attention to some reviews, in case of the requirements are misleading and would need a stronger system. Or... as far as I know there are delivery dropoff points, so unless he never visits bigger cities / central locations, it still could be organized to get it on such a day... I guess.

depending on the game and the screen size/resolution. but i3 could work for him
he will need a good GPU, and these normally come paired with better CPU. and ignore the "gaming" tag, he can play on cheap laptops
and i find Acer and Lenovo cheaper than other brands with similar configuration laptops

I've bought Asus FX553VE i5-7300HQ + GTX 1050Ti 2GB+16GB RAM + 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD + FHD few month ago to replace my broken Lenovo Y700 i7-6700HQ + GTX960M 2GB + 16GB RAM + 256GB SSD + 2TB HDD + 4K + Touchscreen with dead CPU and I'm happy with it.

Not sure if your friend can pay ~$$1200-1500 + shipping for it, but I want to say that it's my best laptop ever even comparing to Lenovo Y700.

I have to say that my expirience with Lenovo laptops (G550/Z510/Y700, last 2 are still working and used by family) says that they are cheap and powerful, but you may face some problems with their quality (I've changed whole body for G550 - 2 years in use, found a lot of cracks on body on Z510 - 2 years in use and in my Y700 CPU died while I was playing SW Battlefront).

The only problem I found in my Asus for in is keyboard layout (look at 4 buttons at the top on Num block - there is "Home", but no "End", "Page up", "Page down" buttons plus Power button is there too).
I have GTA V and Wolfenstein The New Colossus as example of games I play on it and they running great on high settings in FHD Games are installed on HDD, not SSD, cause SSD is split to 2 volumes for my 2 OS (Win 10 + Ubuntu 17.10) 100GB for each~

Anyway, I'm sure your friend can find something cheaper and probably better if he'll look at stores but if you ask me, I don't recommend Lenovo laptops.
If you have any questions - ask them here and I'll try to give answers :)

Buy from US, get a Forwarder..
Thats what I did when I bought a Toshiba Qosmio back in Sep 2011, from US to Perth, AU.
And I'm writing this from that one laptop that still live until this very day.
Back then around USD 1500-1700 (with tax) vs AUD almost 3000.

Buy there, get a better and cheaper one, despite the custom fee in AU, still cheaper.
But do check, idk the current condition in AU.

Can buy from Newegg or Amazon etc.