On Wed, 18 Dec 1996, Paul Pedersen waxed almost poetic about hand tooled 
wood vs. machined wood thusly:

> I find that there is a very definite look to a piece of wood that has
> gone from rough to smooth through the various stages of surface 
> preparation using hand tools.  There's something soft and deep about
> such a surface.  Quite different from a surface that has been power
> planed, even if it was then smoothed by hand.

I love to hand tool.  I love to see the wood progress from rough-sawn to 
project-ready.  Old rank-set jack plane (in lieu of the scrub plane I don't 
yet have); better, finer-set jack; jointer and/or smoother; sometimes 
scraper.  I still sand, but not much (and I never admit to it).

This being said, I don't believe Paul's claim.  I _want_ to believe it,
but I can't imagine that the wood knows whether the jointing, for
instance, was done by a loud, finger-eating monster with a plug-in tail or
by a strong, silent-type with a thin mouth and a frog behind its throat. 
I am certain most of us can tell the difference between a hand-smoothed
piece of stuff and something that got left out under the ROS, but I can't
see how the use of power tools at preliminary stages can be detected. 
Once I plane off the saw marks, can you tell if I cut with a band saw or a
bow saw?  After I lift off a full-length shaving, can you tell if I had
previously dimensioned with many tiny rotating knives or one large one? 
There is some compression and burnishing that goes on, but it seems to me 
that the final stages are what make this difference. 

Of course, I am far from expert.  Is it true?  Can one tell hand work 
from machine work to this extent?

Paul, 
  who would be pleased as punch to be wrong in this case.