From my understanding with Pica200 it's a fixed pixel shader pipeline but (up to four) programmable vertex shaders? It's DMP's customized extensions (Maestro suite) that allow the sort of effects you'd expect from a Unified shader model chip (ie: programmable pixel, vertex and geometry shaders).
Side note, digging around DMP's site, it seems Silicon Studio is one of their Maestro development partners... anyone else like to see 3D Dot Game Heroes given a second chance on 3DS? Seems almost perfect for the system imo...







