stuck for choice with kits.

Delta's look easiest to build and most fun to watch :-) Plenty of kits for around the £350-400 mark.
Personally I'd make sure you had an sdcard reader and lcd screen.
That way the printer doesn't need to be tethered to a pc.

Heated plate - not essential, can be useful but in atoss up between heated plate and screen/card reader the heated plate would lose, by a large margin.

Last time I used my heated plate was simply because it was 12c in my workshop, put the plate on 30c just to get the pla to stick a wee bit better.