I'm fairly new to MVC 3 and and looking for a grid component that allows sorting and paging, but will also use progressive enhancement so provide fully AJAX based sorting and paging.
Ideally I'd like the generated markup to be very clean and customizable with minimal JS embedded on the page
Get a look at http://datatables.net/ There are various nuget packages and codeplex projects developped to easilyintegrate these with asp.net mvc such as this one: http://datatablesmvc.codeplex.com/