Man, that's pretty much what I needed to do. I went back to the drawing board.. dug up the manual on the board /chipset.. found some linux drivers, did some installing / updating, and got it recognizing all of its wonderful nvidia capabilities..

Then I dug up an nvidia manual for configuring TwinView in xorg, and it worked surprisingly easily. I was just getting hung up on failing updates and bad drivers before.

So, to answer my own questions for future googlers: Yes one 'device' in xorg can totally drive multiple monitors, but you need the right nvidia driver and nvidia's twinview config to make it happen. Also, you should RTFM early and often... ; )

Thanks for the help everyone!