Now, I don't get the fuss about the increased workload -- I disagree that a good displacement map cannot be hand-drawn. It can. It requires no more fidelity than a height-map used for parallax occlusion mapping.
My understanding was that there's more about it than just an 8bit greyscale displacement map by also giving info on which parts should get additional details first for the adaptive tesselation. That's more about math than doing art which is why I doubt it's possible to just let a standard 2D artist do that...
That's why you need to actually model the high poly 3D shape / train your guys to use ZBrush so it's still more painting than modelling. For normal maps you could be sloppy when creating them for not so obvious surfaces as the effect doesn't work that good anyway when being really close - that's different when you actually create real geometry...
