You know, deformation of hard surface models isn't unheard of either, and not just for animation purposes.  There's plenty of cases where you may wish to deform an already-modeled hard surface object for editing purposes; with modifiers, for example.

If your objects are full of tris or ngons, it could become a nightmare to apply some changes down the road.  Quads are simple to fix, change, or otherwise deform with modifiers, or by hand.  That alone is a very good reason to always model in quads.  You never know what you may do with a model in the future, or how you may eventually recycle a model you designed before.  Even if you aren't planning to ever redistribute your objects, it's important to have good clean topology.  Ngons and tris are difficult to work with in most modeling applications, compared to proper edge loops on quad meshes.

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