AMD's reason for the Bridge was due to PCIe 1 and 2.0 not having enough bandwidth. That was their reason when asked why Hawaii suddenly doesn't need it. Apparently Tahiti now with PCIe 3.0 don't need a bridge either, although it depends on the both the motherboard and card itself.
As far as I know the 280x (tahiti) requires a crossfire bridge, the only ones that don't are the Hawaii based cards like the R9 290.
Edit: just looked it up from a couple informal sources which verify this.
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