Mipmapping! You may have noticed that when you make an image very tiny on the screen, alot of the fine details disappear. Patterns that used to look nice start looking real bad. When you tell OpenGL to build a mipmapped texture OpenGL tries to build different sized high quality textures. When you draw a mipmapped texture to the screen OpenGL will select the BEST looking texture from the ones it built (texture with the most detail) and draw it to the screen instead of resizing the original image (which causes detail loss).
there was a way around the 64,128,256,etc limit that OpenGL puts on texture width and height. gluBuild2DMipmaps is it. From what I've found, you can use any bitmap image you want (any width and height) when building mipmapped textures. OpenGL will automatically size it to the proper width and height.