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you might be getting ripped off if you're paying $1500 for a Spartan-3 board.

I guess they don't really have the board volume to get low prices. But If you want a graphics card for $1500 that's probably less functional than an NVidia commodity card, I'm not gonna stop you.

OTOH, If you're interested in FPGA programming and a novice at it, you'll want to get a MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper Spartan board (like 50 to 150). See http://digilentinc.com/ for good starter boards.
If you're serious about FPGA programming (or just willing to pay $1500 to $3000) you will definitely want to get a board with a Virtex or Stratix on board:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML501-UNI-G.htm

If you want to have it on PCIx:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML555-G.htm

You can also get FPGAs socketted for AMD's Hypertransport bus and Intel's FSB:
http://xtremedatainc.com/ (Altera FPGAs)
http://drccomputer.com/ (Xilinx FPGAs)
http://nallatech.com/
http://celoxica.com/

(some of these vendors also sell PCI solutions)

FPGA programming environments still mostly suck. it's a market impeded by proprietary standards and a whole lot of NP-Hard algorithms. We're working on it...

Other companies have already been working on using standard AMD servers for reconfigurable computing. Using a CPU socket is a step forward but this has been available for years using FPGAs on PCI cards.

http://www.xtremedatainc.com/xd1000_brief.html
http://www.drccomputer.com/index.html

It's already been done. There are several companies that produce a board with an FPGA and the necessary logic to plug it into a CPU socket on a multi-opteron (hello AMD) system board.

Check out the Xtreme Data xd1000 for a device that looks interesting. It sits on the HyperTransport bus and can can bridge to others (useful if you had a few extra sockets to spare).

There are other devices and toolkits like this - check out Google for more data.

And no - I don't own one - but I wish I had the money to buy one ;-)

XtremeData (http://www.xtremedatainc.com/) has a board with a FPGA that plugs into an Opteron 940 socket. Not exactly what you asked for, but a step in that direction.

Already exists, and there's even choice in the market. Admittedly, it's currently Opteron-only, but it could end up trickling down to 4x4.

Take the most fundamental arithmetic and logic blocks, mix DRAM in locally, with massively parallel interconnections capable of asynchronous data transfer and data-driven clocking (i.e. the clock ticks as soon as the result is ready), and a compiler designed for the parallel environment which is race-condition aware. Basically, your design won't even run unless you have properly described the data dependencies. Add in some engineering training that teaches pipelining and concurrency. Replace stochastic scheduling with determinism. FPGA. Here's an example which I already linked elsewhere in this discussion: http://www.xtremedatainc.com/Products.html

96 cores, 10 watts, Intel has some catching up to do: http://www.clearspeed.com/products/csx600/

About the people wanting to accelerate arbitrary functions, AMD's HyperTransport has the lead there: http://www.xtremedatainc.com/Products.html, http://www.fpgajournal.com/news_2006/09/20060906_0 1.htm

http://www.xtremedatainc.com/Products.html

Shows a product very similar to the drccomputers product. I'm untechnical and as such not able to supply any valuable comments. But i'd be glad to hear from you.

Yet a different startup has created a similar product. The XD1000 from XtremeData Inc. also plugs into an Opteron 940 socket and has an FPGA on it, but an Altera Stratix II instead. Again, the openness of Hypertransport allows full speed access to the other Opteron and also to memories, etc.

See http://www.xtremedatainc.com/Products.html

I imagine there will be a patent battle in the future, or one will take over the other....

Not an employee of XtremeData...