N-Patches ARE Truform. N-Patches are the technical name, Truform is the marketing name.
nVidia cards have had support for RT-Patches, which were nVidia's answer to Truform. However, when a truform-enabled game detected an nVidia card, it would mistakingly think that it had N-patch support. The card would then take the N-Patches and convert them to RT-Patches _very_slowly_. This was around the time of the Geforce 3. Now, there WAS a patch to unlock RT-Patches, but that was for the Detonator drivers, not Forceware.
The software workaround seems more efficient, IMO.
Edit: Saint, about tweaking the models...not really. Apparently it's a simple matter of telling the software "this is a crease" and that's that, for the edges that is.