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Is the performance gain here huge or small?

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What are you doing? Are you creating movies on your PC for a living, or are you playing poker and video games? If it's poker and games, you'll not notice a difference.

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Is it worth having 3 Different Hard Drives and using 1 for the swap file, 1 for your programs, and 1 for Data storage?

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IMO, no, absolutely not. It just makes your configuration more confusing and more complex for no perceivable gain. I think you're better served by having second hard drive installed that you use as a backup for data on the first, so when (note: it is when, not if) the first hard drive crashes, you have a backup to restore from (but this is another topic). You could, if you wanted to, put the swap file on the second drive. Then, any time the swap file was needed (some games with big texture files uncompress the files to the swap file), you would see a performance boost.

Years ago, when ram was not cheap and limited, it used to make sense to put the swap file on another drive. But drives these days are fast, much faster than the 5400 RPM drives of just a few years ago. One thing that will help is fix the swap file size (I usually use 2x RAM size). That way, when windows does use the swapfile, it doesn't have to resize it. If you install 1GB ram, the need for swapping goes down drastically anyway...

IMO:
-1 GB ram (it's so cheap). If cost is no object, then go for 2 GB if your into video games.
-2 7200RPM seagate SATA II drives (1 drive is for backup only). I'll never use WD drives again, i've had 3 crash on me, the latest being my 1 year old Raptor.
-Configure the swap file file for a fixed size (2000MB will fine, 1000MB will reclaim 1GB of space for you to use if you wish). Optionally, for the "best" performance, you can configure this drive to hold the swap file as well. I would probably do it just because it's simple to do, but like I said, for everyday use, you probably won't notice a difference.
-Acronis TrueImage (backup software)