Here are the options I'd look at:
Ultra 5/10, decent enough boxes, they use Sun PGX cards, regular DBUS monitor connectors, etc, so they're pretty much a PC with a SPARC CPU.
The exception is their memory, they use FPM DIMM's, those are hard to come by besides EBay.
Performance is pretty lousy, much thanks to the really ****** IDE controller, their graphics card also sucks(old PGX junk).
Ultra60's and 80's, dual and four way boxes respectively, use SCSI drives, for memory the same holds true for these as for Ultra5's and 10's.
They tend to use UPA graphics cards, these, as noc pointed out, come with 3W13 connectors, so no, a regular PC monitor won't work there.
Good boxes if you can find one for a decent price, and with a monitor.
Blade 100's and 1000's.
The 100's are cheapo boxes, sold new for ~1k$ back in the day, come with UltraSparc-IIe's at 500-650 MHz, which is fast enough, they use standard SDRAM DIMM's, standard IDE drives, etc, pretty much an old PC with a SPARC.
Oh and they come with an old junky ATi graphics chip with 8 MB of RAM iirc, junk for sure, but far better than the PGX in the Ultra5's and 10's.
Good buy if you can find one cheap, since you can upgrade them yourself, and without getting ripped off on memory, disks, etc.
The 1000's are higher end boxes with Ultra-III CPU's, FC-AL disks, and such, mostly they're pretty expensive since they're not that old yet, but once in a while you can find one for cheap, if you do, they have BY FAR the biggest coolness factor.
Then there are Ultra1's and 2's, these are getting really long in the tooth, most of the ones I see these days tend to develop problems with CPU fans, PSU fans, etc, which combined with the fact that upgrading them in any way aside from disks will suck, makes them not worth it imo.
Coming from someone who owns two of them btw
As for Solaris, there are no major differences, as was pointed out, no OpenBoot on i386's obviously, and Disk Suite is a bit different, basically minor low level stuff.
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