I'd be moderately surprised if the VP50 could do it too.
The ability to class some sections of the frame as film and some as video tends to be associated with higher-end devices like Gennum and HQV.
No, that's not right. If the device treats every frame as either entirely film or entirely video then all that's necessary to avoid stutter and combing is to make sure that you treat the frame as video. Stutter and combing can only happen when video is deinterlaced as if it were film. When you do it the other way round (film deinterlaced as video) you simply lose some vertical resolution - this is MUCH harder to spot. If even a small region of video causes the whole frame's processing to switch into video mode, you won't see any combing.
This is the reason why I'm rather suspicious when people report a complete absence of combing on tickers as a result of deinterlacing by a Pace or Samsung Sky HD box. I'd be even more surprised if either of those devices is correctly processing the ticker region of the frame as video and the rest of the frame as film; it's more likely that they're simply treating the whole frame as video (with resulting loss of resolution in the film region). If they do this 100% of the time then that suggests that the film/video detection is biased too strongly towards video, or possibly even that they don't even attempt to distinguish between film and video at all, and just treat everything as video. Either possibility (particularly the latter) means you'll get a sub-optimal experience when watching SD film material.