Crossfire is as good as SLI, it has limitation that you can only use certain cards with certain cards but SLI has this as well but crossfire is slightly less fussy but sli is getting better that way cards still need to be identical for sli to work just like they have to be from a set group in crossfire, the only condition to crossfire is one card must be a master card, but this is a good and a bad thing it makes crossfire better than SLI in some ways but master cards can sometimes be hard to get.
At the moment NO games require a physx card to work, and of the ones that say they will use it UT2007 is the only one of note even in it its just an option, its very likely unless the cards reduce heavily in price or become integrated with gfx cards they will be a fad and die out. A dual core CPU is more than capable of handlnig the extra physx options a card can, you can actually run the physx system demo without a physx card you can download it from there website and try it.