I noticed that if I subdivide a mesh in V6 with the command Subdivide, it will nicely smooth out meshes. In v7 the command works differently, it just divides each mesh face.
The way it behaves in v6 is useful for example to smooth out imported meshes that were built for render time smoothing (like turbosmooth in 3dsmax). So when I import these assets, I need to prepare them by subdividing the meshes.
side note: when I do this the UV mapping gets destroyed, except when I first run UVEditor