Well, there are a lot of decent meshers out there, including the built-in one which is based on an older version of Eric Moootz's excellent emPolygonizer. Not in ICE, but MeshLab has a lot of good tools for this sort of thing.
The real issue, for reptoplogy to be most useful for animation, is that you need your new topology to have good edgeloop structure and flow as well as variable detail. Much harder!
