ben wrote about FPGA boards:
  My beef is that all the low cost boards, still needed
to connected  
the PC
  for use. You can't burn and go. 
I've got about a dozen low-cost boards from the fairly ancient Spartan 2
through the latest Spartan 6, and not a one of them doesn't have
nonvolatile memory into which you can program the configuration
bitstream.  What low-cost boards have you looked at that don't have
nonvolatile memory?