[Heliocon]

That was a cop out, what did I say exactly that gave you that impression? Tesselation is exactly what I said it was, it increases the polygon count of an object. You are the one who does not understand how it works.

Can it be used to turn a flat plane, with a bump mapped brick wall texture into actual geometry/model = yes
Can it increase the polygon count of a wheel/head/round object so instead of lots of little planes (like an octogon) it creates a round surface (to the eye) = Yes.
Can it be used to give increasingly high detail levels to the geometry of a plane/house/landscape as you approach it, working from a base model to smoothly add more and more detail without paging the harddrive? = Yes

It does what LOD does, but more efficiently, and even if it didnt nothing I have said is false. You are the one misunderstanding its function, it can be used to create geometry from a flat surface or like said tesselate objects as it does in Metro 2033 (albeit badly because it was thrown in late). It does not replace LOD but it adds more geometry as you move closer, so in effect its the next step from LOD as its progressive "intelligent" enhancement instead of just loading a completely new higher def model. Also it has been used for LOD in Civ5, so you are flat out wrong on that (also used for the terrain especially mountains).

As you have said we dont know if it is in the code or not, unless you are on the development team like others made clear earlier we dont have much of an idea of how or what will be in the game or not for graphical features. Who knows, they could of extended release back 2 months to add DX11 features in, why else would they be working so closely with Nvidia?