As far as "free" texture mapping, take a look at Doom running on
a PC sometime. Software renderers are much better at doing that kind of
stuff than current SGI hardware. I've got an indy and a pentium on my
desk. Using commercially available software renderers, the pentium kills
the indy on texture performance (ie: it can do it without a problem), and
is pretty close to polygon performance. This is without specialized 3D
hardware. For the most part I think that a lot of the specialized 3D
hardware will just make OpenGL tolerable on a PC, because right now it's
horrible.
Anyway, my point from my question "can we do both?" was more or
less along the lines of what Chris suggested. The specification for 3D
text in VRML should be general and the PC version will probably do it
with a texture and the SGI version will do it with polys. I just don't
think we should get locked down to polys since most people will be using
VRML from PCs or dare I say, Macs.
Kevin