Well, displacement maps are totally different - they don't move geometry at all, they just create the appearance of it at render time.  Vertex maps and weight maps seem to be a way of defining falloff for various things, including how joints deform in rigging a figure, but aren't quite the same thing as a morph target since they're never actually stored as such.

Quote - Would be nothing to model, map a girl in Modo.

After viewing many, many attempts on CGSociety and other places by experienced modelers, I don't think so.  I'm thinking of a lot of WIP threads I've watched and I don't recall anybody with high quality results that took 8 hours to model and texture, more like months.  I think you're giving too much credit to automatic mapping too.

Quote - Throw the mesh in a app that has automatic rigs and the basic mesh is done.

Uh, no, it doesn't work like that at all.  Just face rigging (if you're too awesome to design expression morph targets) is horribly finicky and difficult.  Rigging hands is also extremely difficult even with something fairly easy like Biped.

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