22" is not that tiny, I have that size screen myself and was torn between getting 22/24 and 26 inch sizes, the 26 was just the little kid in me saying yeah get that bad boy, it was to big for my desk and not practical
The serious choice came down to 22" or 24" both are nice sized screens, i went 22" in the end having checked out the sizes in shops i was happy with the screen area on a 22, it's all personal preference.
I too went the GTX280 route (overkill some may say) but what you can be certain of when PC gaming is you can never have to much power, while most games Crisis aside will be fine on most decent cards at that res the comming year will be bringing more and more graphically intense titles, that will see hardware pushed more and more.
The other thing to consider is real life performance vs reviews, while review sites show average game frame rates in the 100FPS marks that does not tell the whole story take the scores for Mass Effect here, which is a game i own
http://www.guru3d.com/article/evga-geforce-gtx-280-hc16-hydro-copper-review/10
Now that looks fine, but what it does not show you is the huge differances in framerates you get when playing the game, you might get 200 odd running down a featureless corridor and then 30 looking out over a massive vista, my experiance of ME on a 280 GTX overclocked is very good, with only minor frame rate stutters, even in more intensive scene's (like looking out longways over the length of the Citadel) frames stay above 30, with 60 + being the norm for most parts, now if i had a 9800 GTX i'm sure the game would still be very playable, but all the odd small stutters i get now when panning the camara would be larger and more noticable and looking out over the Citadel would probably result in noticable slowdowns with sub 30FPS drops in some sections, for me the main reason to get a top card, even though i game at 1680x1050 which is less taxing that higher resolutions was to get good minimum frame rates, so games run smooth on a consistant basis with less FPS dips to interupt the experiance
