By the way, how are switches and cables for > 1Gbps these days?

You can find 2.5G switches with a reasonable amount of ports on the cheap. For 10G though the cost is still prohibitive IMHO unless you are fine with 2 ports.

For cables, I think everything converged to cat6a a while ago, which is both reasonably cheap and perfecrly fine for 10G (up to 100m from what I remember)