This “distilled water superheats because it lacks nucleation points” thing was the topic of a Mythbusters episode that aired in the last few days, which is probably where your friend got it from. If you weren’t paying attention, you could easily mistake that for “doesn’t boil.”
They (Mythbusters) were able to get distilled water to superheat several times (apparently pretty easily) – with a fairly impressive demonstration of dropping a fork into it and having it explode into steam with enough force to throw the fork back out.