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Here's a 100 mega samples per sec digital scope that can be built for $92.70. It's based on a floating point gate array.
http://www.fpga4fun.com/Hands-...

The parts for it can be purchased here.
http://www.knjn.com/

That part will interface to external RAM, but they don't include any or connectors for it, so all you get is 576K. The Litecoin miners will be disappointed.

The Raspberry Pi has a connector layout problem, with connectors on three edges. Then these guys stack another board on top, with connectors on three different edges. They have header connectors hanging over the edge on one side, preventing a panel connection to the USB port. Then, I think, you can stack Arduno shields on top. The result is the electronics equivalent of the sillier Swiss army knife models with 50 tools.

They might have been better off making a single board with the FPGA and an ARM SOIC, along with some RAM, rather than stacking boards. It could still be Raspberry Pi software compatible, but mechanically simpler than a board stack. Like this.

First off HDL vs. C or other HHL's is an apples to oranges comparison. There are ways to program an FPGA using C, but I believe it involves using soft CPU cores as a library of sort. You don't compile the C directly into an FPGA, but rather wrap a soft CPU core around it and then generate the HDL code. That or you just upload a soft cpu core and program that. I may be wrong but that is how it works from my understanding.

Second, most users are not going to write an entire configurable computing HDL design from the ground up. Most likely you are going to have an FPGA on the CPU, motherboard or expansion card along with drivers and API's that are invisible to the user. There are already PowerPC cores on FPGA chips and Xilinx just launched Zynq, an FPGA with a dual core ARM and tons of I/O. Intel is also going to offer an Atom CPU with an FPGA in the same package.

FPGA's can contain multiple "cores" that can be anything as long as they fit within the logic cell count of the FPGA. The architecture I envision is an endpoint block that interfaces the FPGA to the computer (PCI, Hyper transport, QPI, etc.) And a driver that talks to the device allowing for a common API, or at the very least raw communication. Then a configuration application allows you to download cores and then program the FPGA with the cores. Its all transparent to the user. Applications could take advantage of the FPGA directly by using a configuration API that automatically loads its own core(s) for data processing. So a video editing suite can load video codecs for en/transcoding, math programs could compile user algorithms directly into an array of parallel cores for fast processing (MatLAB already does this), audio programs can apply real-time effects through DSP cores in addition to encoding.

FPGA's are logic chips that can do anything. They can Interface to just about any bus/device and tie them together. There are already plenty of PCIe cards with FPGA's, memory, I/O and even high speed multicore DSP's. People have added compact flash cards to Apple II's, hacked the original Xbox by using an fpga as a bus sniffer. Students have implemented the NES entirely in an FPGA, there is also an FPGA arcade emulator that emulates the actual arcade hardware instead of using software emulation.
There are plenty of companies that offer INSANE FPGA platforms to build super computers, DSP farms and even emulation of complex hardware designs using FPGA farms. This tech is only going to get better and better.

FPGA Porn:
http://www.picocomputing.com/
http://www.hitechglobal.com/
http://nanobiowave.com/ATCA_FPGA_FARMS.aspx
http://www.edaptability.com/home.htm
http://enterpoint.co.uk/

I have a few FPGA boards myself. A small Cyclone board from Knjn and a 1.2M gate Spartan 3E board from Digilent. Knjn also has what I believe is the cheapest PCI(e) cards, there is one based on a cheaper Lattice chip that is 99 bucks but Its tied to a crippling and expensive annual license. These vendors have great starter kits:
http://www.digilentinc.com/ (sweet student discounts and great tools that are available for Linux. Their boards are targeted at education and research, lots of I/O interfaces and add on's called "pmods")
http://www.knjn.com/ (Cheap easy to program boards but I think their documentation is lacking. They are however, very helpful when you email them. I believe its a relatively small mom and pop company)

The Papilio is the Arduino of FPGA boards:
http://papilio.cc/index.php?n=Papilio.Papilio

Happy hardware hacking.

I'm using Altera tools for work right now. We have a paid seat, but even in free mode, the web kit is powerful enough to do pretty complex stuff. To experiment with the software, go to altera.com, click download in the upper right corner and download the web kit. Unfortunately, the linux version is not free but you can use it for 30 days without a license. Xilinx also has a free version you can use. As for development boards, here's the cheapest FPGA board I found for Altera: http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-cyc2-2C20N.html I'm using the Cyclone III version of that board. Its quite good. For a Cyclone I board, these look inexpensive and have a wide range of features: http://www.knjn.com/ShopBoards_USB2.html Xilinx has a lot of development boards as well. My experience with Xilinx is better in the support department than Altera. They will give you the software and even dev hardware if you ask nicely. But their software takes more than 12 hours (yes twelve hours) to install and update on a core 2 duo machine. Sad really. The altera software is lighter feeling but just as powerful and seems to be more ... what's the word: friendly. I haven't used Xilinx in a while but I had a hellofa time with it, when I was trying to prototype asics with Virtex II. Altera is currently under mandate to make money from their software, even though they are a hardware company. That makes getting a free license almost impossible. Too bad for them. I've been getting great support for Altera from Octera Solutions (as opposed to Altera itself). Perhaps they can help you. If you're brand new to hardware, you might want to learn Verilog or VHDL first. I think both Xilinx and Altera's web kits come with Modelsim. Its a stripped down version but it will be fine to learn the basics.

Read through some of the tutorials at http://www.fpga4fun.com/ and then head over to the sister site http://www.knjn.com/ to find some FPGA boards. You can get a very good introduction to FPGA concepts for less than $50. The Pluto boards with Altera Cyclone FPGAs are perfect for getting your feet wet.

Entry level boards from both Xilinx and Altera run about $50. Personally, I think it's worth it to spring for the $200 models since you get all kinds of useful things already on it (like RAM), but the $50 ones are out there. Here's some examples.

The first thing to realise there are plenty of technology related hobbyists around the world, although most are not high profile and some may be different very different demographics than yourself.

Some (hobby) groups to consider looking towards for ideas and help include: woodworkers, metalworkers (hobbyists using micromills and mini-lathes from TaigTools and Sherline, etc.), model railroads, model aircrafts (static and RC), robotics, amateur radio (ham), 2600, LUGs, and Artist Run Centres/Communities

Random list of some I use or know of:
  Make magazine http://www.makezine.com/
  Instructables http://www.instructables.com/
  ARRL http://www.arrl.org/
  http://www.sparkfun.com/ (check out their tutorials)
  http://www.fpga4fun.com/ / http://www.knjn.com/
  QRP-L http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/qrp-l/>
  GQRP http://www.gqrp.com/
  http://www.pololu.com/ (cheap stencils laser cut, e.g. 3x4 for $32)
  http://www.diyaudio.com/
  http://www.digikey.com/ (if you're still buying electronics from Radio Shack, get these 3 catalogs now!)
  http://www.mouser.com/
  http://www.jameco.com/
  the ton of various surplus/NOS dealers online
  http://www.frontpanelexpress.com/
  http://www.seattlerobotics.org/
  http://www.chibots.org/index.php
  DorkBot
  http://eyebeam.org/production/production.php?page= tools
  MIT CBA FAB http://fab.cba.mit.edu/
  http://www.leevalley.com/
  http://www.smallparts.com/
  http://www.danssmallpartsandkits.net/
  http://www.wmberg.com/
  http://www.acklandsgrainger.com/
  http://www.grainger.com/
  http://www.onlinemetals.com/
  http://www.amqrp.com/
  http://www.princessauto.com/
  http://www.sherline.com/
  http://www.taigtools.com/