I tend to like to model everything unless it like a brushed/anisotropic surface. When trying displacement like this you would need to up the sub-d level to a fairly high level well beyond the amount of polys used to just model it in the first place. Dantas example above only outputs around 2500 polys so that is light for the affect it is achieving. To try and get the same look with displacement the poly count would end up much higher.

Also you have the issue of moving between applications. If it's all modeled then no problem but with displacement each app has to be tweeked a little bit to achieve the same appearance.