The dynamic track, surface, etc differences are something I think that contact patch approach will be particularly good at. First, I do not even use a simple stick/slip model, but rather a smoothed basis kernel model (similar to SPH fluid sim particles) per seta. This should allow for dirt, water, oil and of course asphalt to blend together seamlessly. Second, since the patch is treated mostly Eulerian, flowing things through it, like water flow, should be more natural. For example, hydroplaning should just fall out.
When we get to that point, there are several options to integrating it, ranging from exposing a plugin point and plugging in from the existing codebase, to reimplementing from scratch within the SMS codebase. There are tradeoffs across the whole spectrum.
I do think it would be class leading. For example, rF2 is I think using a straight stick/slip bristle patch (which is still really good), and builds up a database doing a similar carcass sim offline. In effect, this reduces their carcass to steady state, but they do a much higher element count. Their patch is dynamic though, so they do get a lot of first order dynamic effect, including solving the transient grip problem. We'd get even more.
Consoles is a big question, although at a reduced resolution, but still effective, I think it would work there. The killer will be AI. The CPU cost is too high to expect more than one or two cars, including the player car, on lower end hardware. So we still need something dirt cheap, like the brush in there now, for at least AI, even if not consoles. And we need the models to correlate well, at least for basic steady state curves.
Hence, the first priority is to get the brush spruced up nicely before delving into the dynamic model.