No Faroudja have plenty of competition, and plenty that are better implemented too!! It's just gotten to a point where clever marketing people want you to think you're getting more from one product than another, so Faroudja DCDi (the DCDi bit being a video mode process only so next to useless for DVD) is made a big thing of, as is 720p output etc. Many manufacturers own chipsets or implementations of other chipsets are just as good good, Silicon Image is a well known one still generally regarded as the best chip within a half-reasonable budget, the HQV stuff being awesome but also awesomely expensive. However as always it's in the implementation not the chip. Unfortunately you cannot single down a list of players to what chips are in them as you may miss a blinder, or assume all is well with a Faroudja based deck and find you suffer Macroblocking with your Panasonic plasma!!!
The transport only theory is being used in practice - it's called SDI modding!!! A 3rd party card is installed on your DVD player which seeks a feed directly from the MPEG decoder and passes this raw, digital, signal out into a seperate unit which does your scaling and deinterlacing (i.e. a dedicated video processor). The player then still handles the audio. (even interlaced HDMI will go through an amount of processing before being output though, so in fact requires the whole job lot of internals)