I haven't actually tried this but it was inspired by David Johnstone's answer regarding tectonic plates. I tried implementing it myself in my old Civ project and when it came to handling collisions I had another idea. Instead of generating tiles directly, each continent consists of nodes. Distribute mass to each node then generate a series of "blob" continents using a 2D metaball approach. Tectonics and continental drift would be ridiculously easy to "fake" simply by moving the nodes around. Depending on how complex you want to go, you could even apply things like currents to handle the node movement and generate mountain ranges that correspond to plate boundaries overlapping. Probably wouldn't add that much to the gameplay side of things, but it could make for an interesting map generation from a purely academic perspective :)
A good explanation of metaballs if you haven't worked with them before:
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_//feature/fprogramming/exploring-metaballs-and-isosurfaces-in-2d-r2556
