is there any way to re-triangulate
polys so that each triangle is as
equalateral as possible without
subdividing?
see this thread for an example:
http://odforce.net/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=19&t=1522&s=0435578487442e22db1f91f1dcd26fe7 [odforce.net]

can't help you out houdini wise, but there is a ton of info out there on the delaunay method.. maybe you could do some research in recreating the algorithm somehow within houdini…

also, this seems to be a good resource for mesh generators (ones including delaunay) in case you want to try some out:

http://usuarios.vtr.net/~aortizbe/MGSoftware.htm [usuarios.vtr.net]

I don't think the problem deals with mesh generation but rather more of mesh decomposition. I think is more related:
http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/~held/projects/triang/triang.html [cosy.sbg.ac.at]

mesh decomposition is the sort of thing I'm after.
I'm already making a randomized shortest-distance
retriangulation script for max but I have no idea
how to implement something similar within Houdini.

The easiest way is probably to write something that reads in a .obj file and outputs it as .obj