Nosler is a manufacturer, they put out several different types of bullet, kind of like Winchester-they put out several types of gun...Check out www.nosler.com

"Partition" is a bullet type, it is a jacketed bullet with basically a soft-point construction (bullet tip isn't closed-jacketed), however it has a "partition" connecting across the body of the bullet, a cross section of the bullet (if you cut it in half "hot dog" ways) would show basically an "A" of copper with it's top snipped open with lead in the two cavities.

www.nosler.com/partition.html

A boat-tail bullet has a beveled "heel", instead of being truncated (flat based like you just cut it off flat)...this helps with long range accuracy, however you need to be careful with this, beveling the heel also reduces your foot-print or bearing surface==how much of your bullet contacts your rifling, short boat tail bullets can have problems in overbored rifles. The idea of this, from what I understand, is similar to semi-trailers, the flat tails create a suction zone behind the tail, which increases overall drag, stream lining the tails helps prevent this suction zone.

Here's an example of this, check out the bullet heels

http://www.nosler.com/balltiphunt.html

This stuff is very far from hype, but it depends on what hunting you do as to whether it would actually make a difference to you or not...i.e. if you only hunt deer with your high powered rifles to about 150yrds, you aren't going to need supreme long range accuracy nor exceptional bullet performance...any bullet (other than highly frangibles) will do the job well, but when you hunt like some of us here do, like hunt bear or elk, or any hard bodied heavy animal, or hunt game at long ranges, you need improved performance.

It's kind of like your car, if you just drive back and forth to work, you don't need 18" of shock travel and 24" of body clearance, and you don't need to run nitromethane or ethanol through your 4-banger you just need a car to get you to work, but off-road challenge runners or funny car racers DO need these things. If you hunt deer at 100yrds, a vital zone shot is going to be about 8-12MOA, not very hard to get CHEAP ammo in a turd of a gun to shoot this well, and with a .30-06 or 7mm mag, you've got well over a ton of power, literally. If you push your shots out to 200yrds, now you've got 4-6MOA, still pretty easy with most rifles at 200yrds, but your energy has dropped about 20-25% in the last 100yrds, with poor bullets keeping this accuracy is more difficult, and keeping this energy is harder still...Push it out to 400yrds, and you're looking at 2-3MOA, VERY impressive accuracy from ANY factory rifle at that range, and with a .30-06, you're sitting on about half of your original muzzle energy.

When you're talking about hunting deer, pretty much any bullet is going to push through their meat, maybe varmint bullets won't penetrate enough, but pretty well any soft point bullet will punch through a deer at 200yrds or less-assuming you get it in the right place...when you start talking about hunting buffalo, bears, or elk, you're going to be punching through some thick, hard muscle before your bullet gets to the vitals, and hitting hard bone is NEVER good for bullets, you want a bullet that will retain as much weight as possible but still expand enough to be damaging.