By pirated I assume you mean, "it has a Bavarian theme."

If you read the wikipedia article you referenced it was a normal (struggling) American town until 1962 when a committee was formed to help revitalize the community (with theme makeover). Theme and copy are pretty distant. I wouldn't call a Greek revival house a pirated copy of the Parthenon.

As an architect who has used sketchup for the past 10 years this might not be a terrible thing, although that depends on Trimble -- a company I know nothing about.

Google did increase the speed of the modeller as well as fix several bugs (shadow bug, in particular) but these took longer than seemed necessary -- focusing instead on (reasonably enough) features to integrate it with google earth, as well as some gimicky 'styles'. But it stagnated as a professional modeller. The big improvements have come from independent plugins (which is probably what google intended).
Still, I'm hopeful that Trimble might be able to fundamentally improve the modeler. Incorporating NURBS, would be great, as well as better boolean operations and selection methods (although these last two are somewhat covered by plugins).

About the price -- $500 vs. free seems like a big deal, but $500 compared to any (most) other modelling software is a steal! Besides, the 2 biggest differences are the export options (although the free still can export collada and obj (with plugin)) and the ability to create dynamic components. If you're not using the software professionally you probably won't miss these and if you are you probably won't mind the relatively small cost.
Even if Trimble doesn't continue the free version, the current free version should keep working just fine.

"A good way to mix both techniques is Relief Texture Mapping [ufrgs.br]. It's a good way to get smooth surfaces thanks to the texture interpolation hardware, with no extra polygons." The problem with a technique like this [similar for bump and normal mapping] is that it doesn't affect the actual geometry. That means that the edges of meshes, and the mesh generally when viewed from very oblique angles, will appear flat. Displacement, on the other hand, is a good solution to this as it actually affects the geometry involved.