Goo, Vista can't span. For exampe, on my home office machine, running non-SLI with two cards, my primary card drives two monitors, so the Dream plays on monitor 1 and then appears to be quick-scaled (jaggies are visible) to play as a clone on monitor 2. Monitor 3 is on a second display adapter and never ever shows dreams.
The Matrox products you mention would give you a spanning capability but they are such abysmally low resolution (1280x1024 per monitor) that it'd really not useful for anything except games.
Vista doesn't have the hardware accelerated failings across multiple monitors that XP does. I've played multiple hardware accelerated HD1080p video on multiple monitors under Vista. It is very nice. 