i5-2500k($230)
SSD 60Gb boot drive($130)
2xGTX 570($700)
1Tb spinpoint F3($70)
1000watt PSU ($200)
8Gb RAM ($100-$150)
Blu-ray burner ($130)
Case ($150)
Total = ~$2010
Wasting a third of his budget on SLI'd video cards (and subsequent power supply) is a terrible idea. Please don't encourage people asking for an editing computer to go that route.
Op, personally I would hold off on the 6 core i7s. For 4 times the price you get a 20-30% boost in encoding speeds/time. It is a nice speed boost, but you are really losing out on cost/performance. Combine that with the notion that you will likely spend more time dealing with workflow in the editing window than actual encoding and it becomes a difficult expense to justify.
Do you need a monitor? A nice 27" high resolution monitor, or a 30" comes in very handy when editing. A cheaper route would be to run multiple smaller monitors.
I would get a nice speedy SSD drive to boot off of, and run your apps with. For the large video files, run a 4 drive RAID-0 array off of your motherboard with the Samsung drives Davidh linked to, or the 500GB model if you don't need as much space. You should get up near 600 MB/s throughput on a 4 drive array. Pick up a green 2TB drive or two for storage/backup.