Boy...and they do tend to be beaters, too. My recent BFR at my local flight instruction company, (first one one in several years), was disheartening. This is a pretty nice airport, schedule Delta Connection service, and the FBO that owns the planes is a very nice flight center...all glass and chrome, well-organized, all the amenities. Cirrus service center, and an excellent avionics shop.They have 4 airplanes...three 40-year-old 172's and a Bellanca for tail-dragger instruction. Nothing to rent if you want to go anywhere. The planes, 172's at least, are all pretty trashed. Torn and stained upholstery, cracked glare shields, some instruments that are pretty much permanently placarded "INOP". They fly OK, and I assume (hope) that their cosmetic condition doesn't reflect their maintenance, but it's absolutely true that, compared to a lot of flight training centers, getting into a nice, recent, air-conditioned Cirrus that's actually clean and where everything works would be a completely different experience for a brand new student pilot and would likely set a different tone for that student's impression of General Aviation.Some people just don't want to jump into the local flight school's beater 172 or Warrior and learn to fly. The airplane itself can be a turn-off. I get it -- I've certainly flown in more old "ratty" single engine airplanes than most GA pilots in the last 30 years of my life. I'd much rather hop into an air-conditioned SR-22 in the middle of summer than a 1970s era Cessna or Piper trainer. So from that perspective, I look at the airplane itself as an on/off discriminator for new pilots to join the fold. If the Cirrus draws someone in and it makes for what they feel is a satisfactory training experience for the private pilot certificate, then I say go for it. The onus is now on the school/flight instructor's shoulders to account for the issues mentioned above, not to mention some others, in the process of building a safe, conservatively-minded pilot who meets the ACS for the certificate/rating they seek.
I recognize the challenges that flight training schools face these days, and don't mean to indict individual schools, but I can certainly understand the impression difference between a current Cirrus and the general run of beater training aircraft available these days.