Great post, for what it's worth here's my view on what you ask:
Thunderbolt being currently limited to Mac has in turn limited peripheral manufacturers interest. A few have shown devices at CES this year (and last year too) but it apparently will be much later in 2012 before we see devices that meet the requirements you are asking for - they are coming though.
Now that Intel is pushing to get Thunderbolt into the PC realm we may see a much higher uptake of this technology which will in turn drive the peripheral market forward. This will naturally take time to come to fruition, and you, like most of us have a requirement today.
Apple of course have produced displays which give you what you want, but as you rightly point out these only work with Thunderbolt and your existing kit becomes redundant. Despite this, and being very expensive, this is an available solution that meets the stated requirement.
I use a late 2011 MacBook Pro with two USB display adaptors and the built in display port powering a total of three Dell 20" monitors. I have had this setup working on Lion acceptably since the day Lion came out. With later releases of the driver it is now working very reliably. The main Lion driver issues are related to older MacBook Pro's with the nVidia video chipset. The 'fault' apparently lies with Apple, although DisplayLink have done their best to mitigate the problems. I have had no issues running my displays through a variety of hubs and currently use the built in two port hub on one of the Dell displays.
I too would like a better, higher bandwidth solution - but in the meantime I have a workable setup that gives me enormous screen real estate (4800 x 1200), that makes use of my existing kit and is far, far cheaper than any other currently available solution.
HTH
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