No, the shadow fix is done by applying a depth correction in the pixel shaders, which slows down the object rendering though. The whole problem lies in that even though the hardware moved from a fixed pipeline to a programmable one a long time ago, depth interpolation is one of the last bastions of the fixed pipeline and it complicates our job a lot. I'll be writing a blog about it, mainly in hopes to get it addressed in the newer iterations of graphics cards.
For existing hardware we'll be trying adaptive tesselation in order to get some of the performance back.
It doesn't apply to the water, it looks more repetitive on it because we have fixed the lighting and the repetitiveness shows more. But the water will be updated in one of the next iterations, it was always planned so, the current water was just a base version.