The main problem (barring some fancy and probably patented new techniques) is that whatever gets sent over the wire from the client is a de facto cleartext pass

The main problem (barring some fancy and probably patented new techniques) is that whatever gets sent over the wire from the client is a de facto cleartext password. If your system does the hashing client side and then stores that, an attacker with the login database can just submit the pre-hashed values. To prevent this, you still need some transformation on the server between the login form and the database, which means you're back where you started.