Not sure if Anyone has seen this addon for blender called AmasawaTools - what it does is basically if you take a very simple particle hair system, convert it to mesh, then with this tool it makes flat ribbons that follow the same shape of the particle system you had. It has different settings and is able to simplify the curve allowing the hair to be lower polly. I tested this, then still used decimate to further simplify it. The ribbons of hair are also uv mapped nicely in a straight line.
in my test i used a really ugly hair difuse texture... but the results are not that bad.
