I'd advise you to be more precise in your wording. The terminology is a bit tricky. Path tracing (which I assume you're actually referring to) as a an algorithm

I'd advise you to be more precise in your wording. The terminology is a bit tricky. Path tracing (which I assume you're actually referring to) as a an algorithm isn't a hack at all. It's a direct Monte Carlo solution to the rendering equation which has a pretty straight, albeit long, derivation from Maxwell's equations. Ray tracing hardware (that is, hardware accelerated ray-geometry intersection computation) is still quite constrained computationally. That's why we see little actual path tracing in real time renderers at this time and more of the slightly more correct rasterization based hacks that include ray intersection queries instead of screen space/cubemap based guestimates. Calling them ray tracing is technically somewhat misleading in my opinion.