This is just a potpourri of FPGA related items.
I’m fairly interested in hardware design (although have not really done very much of it). I’ve been looking for some cheap programmable hardware, and found out about Digilent. They have boards based upon the Xilinx Spartan II FPGAs for around $100, and the Coolrunner CPLD for only $39. Xess Corporation has more boards, for a bit more buckage. You can also find cheap board layouts for a Spartan II evaluation board if you are more comfortable having boards fabbed (this one is only a 2 layer board, should be fairly economical to have manufactured). Some people are interested in using FPGAs for audio applications or for central processing units of your own design.