My personal opinion, when hot rodding or modifying a guitar, it yields the best results when you start with a real good guitar to begin with. For instance, I have been thinking of buying a good used MIM tele for around 200 plus and hot rodding that. These have real good bodies and nice necks already, and some of the other parts can be used, like possibly the bridge and some of the electronics. The pickups are really cheap junk in my opinion - I bought a new MIM and could hardly stand to play the noisy thing, and it didn't have good tone. I replaced the pickups with Seymour Duncan Alnico II Pro's and it is one of my favorite guitars now
I think the neck on the MIM teles is real good, it has a very thin finish, almost like oil, where your thumb rests; unlike many teles, like the excellent CV's that have a heavy handed application of thick polyurethane on them - still a great tele though. Modifying a Classic Vibe tele might be a great idea. They are really nice guitars to begin with.
Some of the single coil sized humbuckers are really good and you can install them right into the stock openings with no problem, and they produce great noiseless sound. Some companies make inexpensive noiseless humbucking single coil tele pickups.
If you want a twin full sized humbucker tele Fender makes the Black Top Tele that is a fairly awesome guitar to begin with. It has half way decent humbuckers and is a fairly well built guitar totally ready for modification - new awesome pickups, tuners, etc. The cost about 450 new - when you consider that you will be buying a cheap guitar and buying all the modification parts, you are going to be close to that cost or over it easily, and the Black Top is a very decent guitar to begin with.
Based on personal experience, I recommend starting with a very decent guitar to begin with and then building it up. I have been way more happy going this route than starting with low end stuff and putting a lot of money into it. I wind up with a higher quality guitar in the end, which is what I personally plan to do when modifying guitars in the future.
I'd say shop around for used and try to find something really decent. I see Fender teles for as low as 200. I think the Rondo teles have messed up looking headstocks that destroy the tele vibe, same with a lot of other cheap tele copies. A new decent neck can cost you a lot of money from Warmoth or where ever. Plus I like to have a nice neck and body already fitted very nicely with low action.
The things I look for are very personalized from doing modifications in the past. It's fun to do modifications and you can come up with a cool guitar in the end. My most recent approach is to find a real good guitar to beging with and then build that up to an awesome guitar. That seems to make the process way more rewarding and exciting. You can find real decent used guitars out there that are around the same price you'd pay for a cheap GFS type thing or Rondo thing. To me it just makes sense to hunt down a decent used guitar and go from there.
To each their own, needless to say. If you want to buy a real inexpensive guitar and mess around with it, that's cool. Obviously it's your money and you can do whatever you want. You will learn a lot in the process, for sure. That might be what satisfies you in the end. I would just say, search around and start with a real good guitar to beging with - not necessarily an expensive one, but a real good one.
I hope this helps you think this out. I'm just sharing with you some of my own experiences in hot rodding guitars, based on mistakes I have made myself and the new approach I have that is probably no more expensive than my earlier projects using quite low end guitars . If any the difference in cost has been negligible.