It's actually simpler than that now days, you simple set up a server with a headless web browser on it and route all old-browser and crawlers to that box. They get the same functionality but with-in a page post model. There are a few architectural adherence but for the most part it works pretty well.
I always wondered about this, how does Google prevent this type of behavior? Like serving specific content to search engines and show other content to users... do they check using camouflaged bots?