Okay, okay, just saying "Transmute and Duchess can make beautiful music together" is perhaps not telling the full story. But I just played a game where these two normally-horrible cards worked together quite well, or rather I should say they both worked well with something else that's normally a horrible idea: the first-turn Mint.
Setup: Chancellor, Conspirator, Duchess, Hoard, Island, Jester, Mint, Potion, Scrying Pool, Talisman, and Transmute
Duchess is actually a good companion to the first-turn Mint, because its $2 makes it highly likely that you can actually buy something useful in a deck that's over half dead cards. And with all those Coppers gone, the Transmute is likely to actually be able to hook up with Estates and make Gold. Now, normally I'd be all over the Scrying Pools and Conspirators, especially with Jester as a payload attack which is made better with Scrying, but lack of +Buy is an issue, and hey Hoard is around to further give incentives to go Gold instead. So I buy the Potion on turn 3 with an eye towards the Transmutes, and spend $2P on a Transmute! (I only want one, though, so I get a Pool at some point because I can't buy anything better). My opponent does a good job of gunking up my deck with a flood of Jester-given Potions and Curses, taking the Pool-Conspirator route, but there was enough Gold to grab six Provinces anyway.
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201201/31/game-20120131-201942-bd1c8c37.html...Actually, given the lack of +Buy, I seriously wonder whether the right move on 4/3 would have been to open Chancellor with an eye toward Hoard-BM? But targeted Jester is hard to pass up, if it starts routinely giving out Curses.