With discount, I can get a stripped Mac Pro tower (2GB of RAM, minimum disk, 2.8 GHz Core Xeon (quad), etc.) for $2149. For contrast, Dell will sell me a loaded "Studio XPS" (Core i7 (2.9GHz, also quad), 12GB of RAM, 750GB disk, and a beefier graphics card) for essentially the same price ($2139). If I strip the Dell down to be more comparable to the stripped Mac Pro tower, it costs $1119 -- half the price, faster CPU, and still with more memory and disk! I'd always thought that, with the Intel transition, Apple's prices were no longer insane. That's clearly not true here and it's quite frustrating.
The Mac Pro is a workstation class machine, thus comes with error correcting memory ($$), dual CPU socket motherboard ($$), and Xeon class processors ($$). So, it's not surprising that a Dell desktop machine beats it in price. If you priced it against the Precision workstations Dell sells, the prices would more evenly match up.
Also, the Corei7 based Xeons aren't out yet, so the Mac Pro, and similar boxes from other vendors are a bit aged at this point.
Option #2 is to go the Hackintosh route.
Don't. It's possible it won't be stable. It's possible some software may not work depending on how deep the hacks have gone. You won't have proper support. And updates may break your machine. For a hobby, maybe. But for any machine even resembling production for work, or serious home, it's not worth it.
New iMacs, and Mac minis are due out any time now. 10.5.6 already has drivers for them. And odds are, they will all be able to drive a 30 inch LCD.
Ignore the Tritton product if you plan on attaching it to a Mac. It had a really poor still in beta driver that ate CPU time like crazy, and the redraw rate on the second display was poor. I returned mine, and got the eVGA device with DVI, and downloaded drivers from the DisplayLink site. It's not as good as a direct video card, but usable as a second screen for my work Mac Mini.
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