Generally, the better boards give you more overclocking options, are more stable when they're used to overclock, and allow more hardware configurations (like newer CPUs, more than one graphics card, etc). The better chipsets will also give you a slight performance boost, but I doubt you'd notice unless you measured it.
If you're not planning on overclocking, and aren't going to be running any kind of exotic setups like triple SLI then you don't need an expensive motherboard.