Any thoughts on how to make a topology influence deformer like Zbrush's transpose tool?

Basically i'm looking for a procedural way to do http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/skinning/ [blender.org] this is houdini.

In trying to produce similar results using softpeak/transform I noticed (un)selecting “Ignore point connectivity” has no visible influence on the selection. Is this a bug or is there something I'm missing?