A SQL Server cluster is not a scalability solution, is strictly a high-availability solution. In a SQL Server cluster only one node is active and handles load, all the other nodes are just passive stand-by, waiting in case the active node has a hardware failure. As such froma SQL Server cluster you obtain, at best, the performance of a single SQL Server instance. You'll find sometimes references to a so called 'Active-Active' deployment, but that is not a SQL Server cluster. The so called 'Active-Active' is two separate clusters that use each other's node in reverse roles (one cluster in active on node A and passive on B, the other is active B and passive on A).
If your application is already partitioned and each customer has a separate database, then you'd be much better continuing to scale out. The problems of administration and maintenance can be addressed, once you automate the administration of 4 servers (ie. now) you can automate the administration of 1000 servers. So are the problem of versionning, deployment and account provisioning.
While right now you may be attracted by a perceived ease of administration, troubleshoot and tunning from a scale up solution, you are going to have new problems, more difficult to solve, culminating with a limit on how high can you scale up.
Updated After you edited the OP with explanation on concerns related to scale out.
Indeed scale up and clustering offer a high availability solution. There are basically two HA solutions for SQL Server: clustering and database mirroring. Since you plan for thousands of individual databases, this pretty much rules out mirroring. What you have to keep in mind though is that SQL Server clusters are supported only on a restricted list of hardware combinations:
Microsoft server clusters are only
supported on cluster solutions that
are listed in the Windows Server
Catalog under Cluster Solutions. To
view the Windows Server Catalog, visit
the following Microsoft Web site:
http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/
That doesn't mean you cannot run a cluster on any hardware pair/group that has a shared SCSI buss. It means you won't be able to request support from Microsoft CSS if you have an issue on a hardware that is not approved.
SQL Server clustering offers protection against hardware failures, except media failure (since the media is shared between nodes). What it doesn't offer protection from is human administration errors, which unfortunately are the primary reason for down-time. With one thousand customer databases on a single cluster, you'll have a very large omelette cooking in one basket...
As for you question about how many databases can a cluster run, ultimately a cluster has only one active instance at any time, so the limits of a single instance apply to a cluster as well. Having one thousand databases attached is not a big thing, the real question is the load, how many users will be running queries simultaneously. To get a ballpark region of numbers, consider that the TPC-C benchmarks published for SQL Server are for some 1.2 mil transactions per minute on a 64 way Superdome, which means roughly 16k transactions per second. You anticipate about 5k clients connected, that gives you a margin of 3 queries per client per second, and to reach that you need a pretty beeffy hardware and an exceptionally well tunned application.