IMO Minorl has made several excellent points in his post, but this one particularly deserves emphasis (although ZD also makes a good point in response, at least when it comes to speakers having especially high efficiency). For a given level of sonic quality, the price of an amplifier will tend to have a significant degree of correlation with its power capability, and with its ability to drive speakers having difficult impedance characteristics. So how a given investment in the amp + preamp should be apportioned between those two components will tend to depend on the efficiency and impedance characteristics of the speakers that are being used.
You may not need a stupidly expensive amp for your pre-amp because the speakers you have are extremely efficient, don't need massive power and interact well with your amp, so you can go with a very low power, lesser expensive (not all low power amps are less expensive. I know!!!) amp.
One important reason why, as I said earlier, that IMO a general purpose answer cannot be defined.
01-26-15: WlutkeThis is true. But it is also true that the preamp can't sound any better than the amp allows it to. So the location of a given component in the chain is in itself of no significance, IMO.
Your amp can't sound any better than what the preamp gives it.
Regards,
-- Al