As a first budget-protecting piece of advice, use whatever you can find for your surrounds. Best not to use something ridiculously cheap and crappy, but I wouldn't worry about matching them to the fronts. You can always upgrade later if you want, and they'll add a lot to a movie by having sound in the rears. The same probably goes for amplification of the surrounds.
There are a lot of very nice amps in a price range (used) that would be the basis of good sound 2-channel system, but it'll be a lot harder to find a good $1200-1500 used 5-channel amp (or combination of amps that total five channels). I don't have any hands-on experience with 5-channel amps in that price range, so I won't attempt a recommendation other than to say Rotel consistently gets high marks from reviewers.
If you're looking for a softer sound to the speakers, I have a lot of friends who are very satisfied with their PSB-based systems. You can get a lot of speaker from PSB for not a lot of money. They even make some incredibly inexpensive pairs you could use for surrounds if you don't have something else to plug the gap. Also nice about PSB is that it's easy to upgrade within the line over time.
You could blow your budget just a bit and look at the Muse Model 9 DVD player, which is also an excellent CD player. You can get them used for $1200-1400 which, again, will probably contribute to putting you beyond where you want to be, but you'd upgrade everything else in your system a couple times over before you'd begin to see this as the weakest link, and it serves a dual purpose (which also greatly helps the WAF).
Hope this helps. I watched the new U2 Elevation concert DVD in surround sound the other night, and it was absolutely electrifying. It's fun to have a system that does both. -Kirk