Are there significant performance differences when linking to a simple data view, rather than a data table, in a simple data view?
I might be misunderstanding your question. Are you asking if given the following tables and views:

CREATE TABLE dbo.Foo
(
    [col1_abc] INT
    , [col2_def] INT
)
GO

CREATE TABLE dbo.Bar
(
    [col1_ghi] INT
    , [col2_jkl] INT
)
GO

CREATE VIEW dbo.vwFoo
AS
SELECT
    [col1_abc] AS col1
    , [col2_def] AS col2
FROM
    dbo.Foo 
GO

CREATE VIEW dbo.vwBar
AS
SELECT
    [col1_ghi] AS col1
    , [col2_jki] AS col2
FROM
    dbo.Bar 
GO


Will this:

SELECT  
    f.col1
    , f.col2 
    , b.col2
FROM
    dbo.vwFoo f
INNER JOIN
    dbo.vwBar b
ON  b.col1 = f.col1


perform comparably to:

SELECT
    f.[col1_abc]
    , f.[col2_def] 
    , b.[col2_jki]
FROM
    dbo.Foo b
INNER JOIN
    dbo.Bar b
ON  b.[col1_ghi] = f.[col1_abc]


If that's the question the answer is yes, the performance will be identical. 

In SQL2000, the optimiser sometimes struggled with deeply nested complex views joining to each other but not with simple scenarios such as this. I've not encountered the problem so much in 2005+.