Currently ground splatting is done quite manually in glest and it doesn't uses the graphics card.
This should really be changed to real so called "terrain splatting".
This will allow bigger/nicer ground textures without huge memory usage like we have now.
( Later this way of texturing is also useful for cliffs ! )
here is some info about splatting...
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=372568