Yeah but MSIE decided to go with EOT which is arguably why no-one else bothered. If they'd used TTF then other browsers would have implemented it earlier because it would actually be a usable solution.
I don't think the format was ever really the problem; people are willing to put up with all sorts of conversion shite to get things up on the web (FLV, for example.) IE's problem was entirely that it was ahead-of-its-time in this regard: fonts were too big on yesterday's internet to download at a decent clip for instant display, and there weren't any open fonts that anyone was interested in using.
