Care to elaborate how? The only way I can figure is once you know the hyperfocal distance, you must find some object at said distance, AF on it, and lock the focus down using MF mode. But that is why I said "practical" as unless you have a tape measure in your camera bag....
Ruahrc
Essentially, that's it (though you don't need to AF, you can MF all the way)- it's just like rifle shooting or golfing- you go with either a known distance object, or you estimate distance. Just like with the other two disciplines, it's one of those things that requires practice to get down- pretty-much all unknown distance rifle shots work exactly the same way- yet somehow many people find it perfectly practical to take an unknown distance shot even though they not only have to deal with distance estimation, but humidity, wind, altitude, bullet drop, concealment and even incoming fire.
You can also use the focus point indicators and their spacing in the viewfinder similarly to mil dots in a scope's reticle to determine the distance to a known or estimated size object- though this requires a bit of up-front work, it's a *very* workable solution to commonly sized objects- and mostly we're shooting commonly-sized objects such as people, cars, pets, wildlife... So, if I know that a 6' person is 1 a focus point tall at 50 yards and 1/2 a focus point at 100 yards, then if I have a person who's 3/4ths of a focus point tall, I know they're at 75 yards, a little less, they're a little further, a little more they're a little closer.
You don't have to deal with wind, hold over/under or bullet drop- or wind and ball lie if you prefer- so it's even easier than either of the alternative examples. People who've never shot a scoped rifle with proper instruction also think it's pretty impossible and impractical to shoot a target at an unknown but relatively long distance while those who've had the training understand that it's just a matter of practice, practice, practice.
As far as your definition of practical, I'll again have to disagree- for instance, let's say I have a D3x with a 70mm lens, I know that f/11 is inside my diffraction limit, so I'll go for f/11- my trusty DoF calculator tells me that at 30 yards, my near limit is 31.1 feet and I'm good to infinity from there. WIth a 400mm lens, I know the same shot gives me a near limit of 85.1 feet and my far limit is 95.5 feet. If I do it regularly, I can generally get within the margin of error with the camera and the rifle (though the rifle requires more work and more data,) I'm still working on the golf clubs.
If I'm distance-estimating challenged and I haven't calculated my target size and the size of my AF points at distance, then I can simply carry a rangefinder in my pocket, or consult a GPS or use a correctly scaled map. All of those options give you the ability to pre-focus and get good results, distance scale or not.
For examples of ranging with a mil-dot scope, see
http://www.shooterready.com/mildot.html