Opengl has support for 8 lights, and if you use them like the nehe tutorials suggest, they suck. How can you make dynamic lighting like some games (eg unreal). quake2 uses a lightmap but the lights have jagged egdes and it doesnt look good. how do ppl do moving lights that emit light in a spherical shape rather than direct, and how do you have more than 8?
The NeHe tutorials has just some easy enable/disable of the light. I think that the lightmaps in Quake2 is only for the static lights. In my opinion was the lightmaps in Quake2 wonderful.
One way to do dynamic lighting would be by using OpenGL lights. If the polygons is small enough will it look good.
Projected textures can be used for spotlight effects see http://reality.sgi.com/mjk/tips/projtex/
The limit of 8 lights is per polygon. Here is how you more than 8 in a scene http://reality.sgi.com/mjk/tips/VirtualizedLights/VirtualizedLights.html
This is of course a very big and hard topic with rapid changes. On the nvidia developer page will you find a lot of stuff http://www.nvidia.com/Developer.nsf