The E3-1230 is really a price/ performance standout. Workstation wise I would look at the i7-2600K though just because overclocking is fairly easy on it. Bad thing is you lose ECC.
Patrick,
I absolutely agree with you that the E3-1230 is at a good price/performance point. It's much better than the Xeon 34xx CPUs. For most uses, it's better than the 35xx and 36xx CPUs. Overall, these are nice CPUs, and I expect to build quite a few of them for customers.
However, you and I have different definitions of the purpose of a Workstation. To me, the primary requirement of a Workstation is that it needs to be ROCK SOLID. This is mainly because most Workstations are used in businesses (usually by programmers & engineers) to perform profit-making tasks. From a statistical standpoint, overclocking reduces reliability. This statistically lower reliability means that more programmer/engineer time is wasted, due to down hardware. This costs the company money, as the programmer/engineer is being paid to be less productive (often non-productive), and an IT person is being retasked from their other work to fix the workstation. Overclocking also requires explicit attention from the hardware people in IT to properly ("safely") set the overclock initially. Often the cost of that time is more than the cost to step up to a faster CPU.
Also, a Workstation needs to be able to be recreated at will. With overclocking, you reduce the ability to reproduce the system ("safe" overclocks may be different on different chips).
Finally, many Workstations are used for design functions. If there's a CPU-induced glitch, and the CPU has been overclocked, that's the fault of the overclocker (the business can be considered to be liable), and is not acceptable in business. If the same glitch occurs on a non-overclocked system, that's the hardware's fault (the business is not normally considered to be liable, if they're proactive about the resolution, once it's identified), and is normally considered to be acceptable in business (some uses require validation of results on multiple systems, for reasons of liability).
When a Workstation needs to be faster for single-threaded applications, the solution is to buy a faster CPU (higher clock or improved architecture). When it needs to be faster for multi-threaded applications, you add more cores, more sockets, or move to a cluster, as appropriate.
In general, overclocking of a Workstation is a BAD choice. In a home, for a non-business Workstation, it might be acceptable, but I wouldn't suggest it.
In case you can't tell, I don't like overclocking. I've seen it lead to numerous difficult to find problems, including intermittent issues, and corrupted data. New CPU designs (Core2 and later) have more overclocking headroom than the older CPUs (P4), but there's still an increased chance of failure and increased power usage. These problems increase significantly when the CPU voltage is raised.
I build systems for a living, and the majority of my customers are businesses. When they call me, I'd much rather have them tell me that they need another system, than that they need me to fix the system they have. I try to configure my systems with that in mind, and I mostly succeed (disk failures are different - they can't be avoided).