I was under the impression you could jack up the engine a bit and take out the old mounts and put in the new fairly easily...

It's just an after-market version of the stock "K" member, which is the crazy looking hunk of metal that holds your motor and suspension all together up front. The after-market version is lighter, stronger and allows use of A-Arms that allow the use of coil overs.

 

you dont have to take the engine out to replace the mounts.

the k member is the thing that the engine+enginemounts attach to. the car comes stock with a stamped steel nasty huge version. a tubular uses steel tubing to get the same strength, if not more strength. it sheds alot of weight off the car and makes things alot easier to get to.

if you were to do engine mounts, you could simply jack the motor up (after you loosended the motor mount bolts) by the oilpan or bottom pulley. just put a 2x4 between the jack and the pan to increase the "footprint" so you dont dent or crush the oilpan. this will allow you to jack up and support the motor, unbolt and drop the k-member, remove+replace mounts, replace k-member.

its a bit more involved than that, but i did a whole front end swap in a weekend with nothing but hand tools (including a 15" breaker bar). there's some good stuff on the internet to help you out. if i were to pay someone else to do it, i'd expect it to cost about a days worth of work. but to me, a weekends worth of work is well spent time to save the $ that i'd end up payin someone else.