If I were getting a monitor now, I would look for one capable of producing 1920x1080 as the native res, if going for a 22-24 inch.
You'd need a better video card to play games, but when the time came to play true full HD content, you would not have trouble doing so.
16:10 monitors are annoying in my experience, and a 16:9 monitor is much prefered, even though full HD 16:9 monitors would probably come with a premium at the moment.