It's more or less true, but that hardware doesn't exist in the general population having it. I'd only count the ones with the green 'shipping' box from that chart.

Mining with a CPU hasn't made much sense for a while now. Check out this wiki article in answer to your question: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU

https://www.weusecoins.com/en/mining-guide also offers some good information to read.

Unfortunately, with the hardware you have it may not make sense to mine if you account for your electricity costs. It comes down to what your motivations are for mining.

I'd make the recommendation that you try them all and pick the one that works best with your hardware. Cross reference these wiki pages: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison and https://de.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware#Nvidia
You can see what hash rates people are getting for similar hardware. Some entries also have some of the command line arguments for the different miners you can try too.

Don't forget to be aware of your power consumption. Unfortunately Nvidia hardware isn't the most efficient for mining bitcoin.

If you're bandwidth limited, you could try bootstrap.dat: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0

You'll still verify all the transactions that you downloaded, but now you'll be CPU bound instead of Network bound.

The gist of the different miners is that they have different capabilities for different hardware and/or different extensions for mining pools. You may want to check out this wiki page to see how they differ: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_software

I made a gag bitcoin price tracker on http://thefuckingbitcoin.com

It's a parody of http://thefuckingweather.com - talking with the webmaster of TFW after getting his/her blessing was cool too. Apparently TFW is ran on Microsoft's Azure.

I wrote about it here: http://richardbbrooks.com/blog/making-thefuckingbitcoin/

And now I'm at five posts and just have to wait out the time lock. Woot!

I'll put my address in the hat:
18Sbid85kDCKwYvKtttHGQscpwPRQ3o1AE

I wouldn't worry too much. From attending some bitcoin meetups and conferences recently it seems that many people are working on their own exchanges. Give it some time and there will be plenty of competitors.

A turn key solution may be to do testnet in a box: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/testnet-in-a-box/ and https://github.com/freewil/bitcoin-testnet-box

Probably not good to use 'em long term, but should help you get an idea of what may be involved. For your own local currency, you probably don't want the difficulty pegged at one.

Essentially: a long time listener, first time caller.