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These cards speed up X in two ways. First, they offload some common screen- painting operations from the main processor onto specialized processors on the card itself. Secondly, by using a local bus, they make it possible to send commands to the card faster than the ISA bus could allow. The combined effect can be eye-poppingly fast screen updates even at super-VGA resolutions.
In general, the ATI approach (normal bus, dedicated blitter and optimization for special functions like character drawing) will speed up text display, text scrolling and window resize/move operations a lot, but line-drawing and graphics only a little. S3, on the other hand, speeds up high-bandwidth graphics drawing a lot but doesn't have as big an advantage for ordinary text operations. You pays your money and takes your choice. Benchmarks indicate that most non-CAD users are better served by the ATI approach.
There's no longer much reason to bother with any of the commercial X servers like MetroLink or X/Inside. XFree86 now supports most of the high-end cards that used to be the special preserve of the commercial X versions.
If you're feeling really flush, plump for a 15", 17" or even 20" monitor. The larger size can make a major difference in viewing comfort. Also you'll be set for VESA 1280x1024 when everybody gets to supporting that. In the mean time, the bigger screen will allow you to use fonts in smaller pixel sizes so that your text windows can be larger, giving you a substantial part of the benefit you'd get from higher pixel resolutions.