You're wrong, he can rip the dvd.
As long as the drive is capable or reading the dvd, it's capable of ripping it.
A Combo Drive will read cds and dvds and write to cds.
I use handbrake to rip my dvds.
I've also heard that MacTheRipper works preety well too.
Here's the download links for your convience http://handbrake.fr/?article=download http://www.mactheripper.org/
Sorry, I thought he meant burning a DVD with the Combo drive. MTR 2.66 is great for ripping anything but the most current DVD's, for those you need to use MTR 3.0 with is available with a donation onlyl.
As far as i know, handbrake doesnt rip dvds at all, it only converts the video ts files (which are extracted from either non-protected dvds by a few different programs or ripped by Mac the Ripper from protected dvds) into something else such as mp4s ect.
I rip DVDs using Handbrake on my iBook with it's combo drive. It's not the fastest thing in the world but beats carrying around extra DVD cases when you can have 20+ movies stored on your hard drive. I rip them to .avi with a target mode of 1000mb.