@ Trist: They’re supported by mental ray in 3ds Max 2012. There is also Wayne Robson’s free mi shader for older versions, which I had no trouble using when it first came out. Vray also supports them, so long as they are the correct type. Support in all Autodesk products will undoubtedly improve over time, and become less of a pain to deal with.
@ gasoil: I understand and agree with everything you said. You have to realize that I wasn’t talking about brushes in this case though. At the end of the day, many artists still have no choice but to use the tools demanded of them if they want to see a paycheck. Some have the freedom to use as many or as few tools as they want to achieve their vision, but a lot of others don’t. Those working in production pipelines for commercial purposes often tend to be a bit more limited. If you learned 3ds Max, but the company who hired you uses Maya, you better learn to use Maya and fast because they’re not going to start using Max for your benefit. More importantly, time equals money, and a broken pipeline can be costly.
In the field of video game development, a highly competitive industry where many developers have come to rely heavily on Zbrush, normal map generation inevitably became a must have feature (just as I suspect vector displacement will too some day). A lot of them might not be using Zbrush at all today if this ability hadn’t been added. I still remember when Zbrush 2.0 came out. Nearly every post in the support section were questions involving how to make it work in their pipeline (i.e. with other software). I know Pixologic doesn’t have any obligation to bend to market pressures, or provide tools artists may ask for, but why wouldn’t they? If they didn’t care, we wouldn’t have things like obj export, texture/disp/normal map export, GoZ, ZAppLink, UV Master, Blend Shapes, and so on. Such additions may not be of primary importance to them, but there is at least some interest as you can clearly see. Zbrush is indeed the content creation tool you describe, and an impressive one at that, but it doesn’t have to be limited by an either/or scenario. Being versatile is one of those most important attributes any program can have, and should have.
I enjoy our little discussions, and I thank Pixologic for providing a place in which we can have them. I look forward to your reply. 
