I remember there was one company I was a consultant at just 7 years ago that gave us wonderful desktop machines, multi-core, multiple disk drives, lots of RAM, etc, but the monitors they gave us were 14", under the premise that we should be developing to the size of screen that the users had.

The one software thing I do like to have is a simple .Net program I wrote which polls a list of SQL Servers in an interval I define and returns info from the performance counters and ring buffers dynamic management views so that I quickly have a birds eye view of what's going on in all my SQL Servers.