I once again have to note here that there is a very real limit on what polycounts are practical for characters. For an average human CG model, it's quite bad to go over 15-30 000 quad polygons, because skinning it to a skeleton will become overly complicated.
The current trend in offline CG is to build such an average resolution character, bind it to a skeleton, and then subdivide it at rendertime to smooth out the poly edges, while additional detail can be represented with displacement mapping. Of course if you can only work with a set amount of subdivision iterations for the whole model, than you can still get jaggied curves in close-ups... and adaptive tesselation has the danger of 'popping' artifacts. PRMan tesselates to micropolygons, so in that case, the resulting surface always looks perfectly smooth.
As far as I can tell, if you'd ask your character riggers to work with 100.000+ polygon meshes, they'd simply jump out of the window. I'd surely not try it... (then again, a collegue here rigged a 250.000 poly character - but it took him about 2 months, and it was so detailed because it had a very complicated armor)
