Okay, I'll spell this out a bit differently.
Tessellation in the modern graphics sense (whether it's carried out on a tessellator or in software or by hand or whatever) refers to taking a polygon and breaking it up into more polygons.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker does not use tessellation in this sense of the word.
The language that led people to believe that Wind Waker had tessellation was a reference to a "tessellated water plane." However, this was misinterpreted. The reference to a "tessellated water plane" uses a mathematical definition of "tessellation" which basically refers to any representation of something with a mesh of polygons. The "tessellated water plane" is just a surface made up of a large number of polygons. There is no "tessellation" operation happening on the geometry. The water plane was not created by having a processor on the Gamecube take a plane and break it up in real-time. "Tessellated water plane" just refers to the fact that the water plane happens to be made up of a bunch of polygons.
Sorry to interrupt, but isn't it more apt to just mention that GPU7 has a tessellator? and will almost certainly be using it for tessellation, and is likely based on AT LEAST R700's Gen 2 AMD tessellator if not a Gen 3 (enabling DX11 tessellation hardware compatability?)
I mean it is great to learn about this stuff, although I believe coldblooder mentioned this pages back with pictures from the game (wind waker) showing it in action but it is sort of just treading on old topics, eating up space in the discussion of course I've brought up the power efficiency stuff in the past but it seems we are back to 8GFLOPs per watt, which is something I feel is because that sort of thing is being over looked and needs to be pointed out again.
fourth storm: I read your theory again, it does answer why the Shader blocks would be so big and if the ALUs are individually larger the entire chip might be sucking down more wattage. In this case you might be right, obviously my post above was directed at the idea of 160ALU GPU sucking down too much power, this however could make sense. We really wouldn't know, but a question I have is that having 160 ALUs still limits the polygon count however that was before taking into account the TEV modifications, are you suggesting that somehow it is getting close to the 500million polygons that 360's Xenos can perform? or maybe you think however GCN produces twice the polygons per clock is being done here? I find that a pretty big bottle neck because obviously porting 360 games might not require a 500 million polygon count, but the less you have available from that number, the harder it is going to be thanks to all the other work the chip has to perform.