Best laptop brands for what? Is your friend gaming? A professional who requires a notebook-workstation? Also a price range? Quality can vary depending on the price and what exactly your looking for.
For gaming, Clevo/sager based notebooks have a very good reputation but also carry a hefty price tag. Asus as well as MSI have good gaming notebooks - but I consider their quality 1 tier below clevo/sager based laptops - but they do have better prices for similar specifications.
For basic business computing (word, email, internet) a lenovo based laptop are quite good.
Dell laptops are alright. They are decent all-arounders - but in no way are they great laptops (well besides their alienware offshoot, which hasn't been that great as of late IMO).
Apple Macbooks/air are pretty good as well. Their cases are very well constructed. However you will be paying upwards of 1.5X for similar hardware on a Windows machine. The only "downside" is that if your friend doesn't know much about Apple's OS - it may be useless to him. Also they seem to be somewhat harder to upgrade than other solutions.
To me there isn't really a "bad" laptop brand out there. Every company has issues with some of their models.
Acer laptops - have been playing "catch up" to every other company out there, they have decent netbooks and notebooks, but I wouldn't consider them that great.