XUP stands for Xilinx University Program. You will most likely be unable to use that board with LabVIEW FPGA except in the off chance that you are a student at a university which participates in the Xilinx University Program. But, just in case you would like some more information on the XUP agreement and Spartan-3E board, visit this site http://digital.ni.com/express.nsf/bycode/spartan3e There is a big agreement process before you are permitted to download the driver which will then let the board be targeted in LabVIEW as an FPGA target device.
Personally though, I own that Spartan-3E board just for FPGA experimentation, and it is an excellent choice for getting started with FPGA design. I would also recommend the NEXYS2 board from Digilent Inc. www.digilentinc.com It is very similar to the XUP board (which doesn't require you to be a student to purchase) but without some of the extra bells & whistles, like different RAM choices, 2 line display, rotary encoder, ethernet. It is meant to be used for embedded development with a softcore microprocessor, like Xilinx's Microblaze although the non-free Xilinx EDK will be required to use Microblaze.
I don't know much about Altera development, especially with regard to embedded development on their systems, but I think Xilinx has been making steady improvements in their software and their hardware is always top notch.