Q3 engine's curved surfaces are actually quadratic bezier spline patches (9 control points per patch). The patches had to be designed with special tools in an editor and were tessellated at runtime to an appropriate detail level based on the computer's graphics settings. The engine did not support any kind of collision detection with these surfaces so they had to be enveloped in invisible brushes to appease the BSP system for collision and culling.
While they were interesting at the time the reasons nobody really does this anymore are probably:
Governments often do not purchase software licenses from Microsoft through the same retail channels as businesses or home users, instead they usually have negotiated licensing agreement that entitles them to the latest version of certain CALs and common software suites under a specified annual cost. There isn't necessarily a cost for the upgrade, especially for products like Microsoft Office.
Here in Alberta, our provincial government has a licensing agreement for K-12 education that includes Office. However, even if they didn't, there are probably a lot of reasons that end users aren't aware of that are important.
Just a few examples:
Hint: Not all GPUs have IEEE FP compliant math. Often they break the standard, or do something else altogether just to improve performance.
I can't speak for ATI, but actually all FP32 math on Nvidia architectures for many generations now has been IEEE compliant, excluding NAN and -inf +inf and exception handling cases, and except for their hardware sin, cos, log implementations, and except when using the fused multiply add instruction (though the last one you could actually get around by using special compiler intrinsics to avoid the fusing).
Fast, cheap, good: pick two.