I found a Topographical editor that multiple threads on various 3d modeling forums referred to while going through a couple of their tutorials. It seems as though it can be usefull and is very lightweight. It is standalone and looks like it was written in C and python. The website is currently down but overall it looks like it can be somewhat usefull. Its actually one of the first .exe extension file that worked right away without problem in linux which is a first for me :P. I'm not sure who here on the forums would find this usefull but one can certainly give it a look maybe even a starting point for a model tweaking editor on the platform 
The latest download they have was commited in September 2007 but the svn's latest update was March5th 2010
I'm curious, I think I'm gonna give it a try as it seems very intuitive.
That's kind of an interesting way of going about modeling. Most tools offer this functionality but don't make it so front and center. It looks almost like a Z-Brush sort of mentality… very cool 