hi
During testing of an addon I'm writing I uncovered a possible bug in cycles or blender.
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=30028
To reproduce run this addon: http://www.pasteall.org/30869/python
(it creates a test scene for rendering materials)
In cycles 3dview solid mode the plane object looks correct
In cycles 3dview rendered the loc/rot/scale are not applied to the plane & the cube is blocky
When rendering (f12) the plane is also correct.

In the addon line 200, I commented out:
# bpy.ops.object.transform_apply(location=False, rotation=False, scale=True)
as I found this fixed the issue, however given that I only apply the scale I think there may be a bug in cycles or bmesh taking into account transforms.