May be I've read not so carefully, but I am not sure at all that these billboards are cheap.. Storing mipmapped 3D textures is very expensive GPU memory usage. One object - one 3D texture... Assuming that 3D texture size is rounded up to the nearest power of two, for object 129x129x129 (actually for 256 x 256 x 256) we need 2^24 * 4 = 64Mb).. Not a practical approach if I understand it correctly..
And rendering technique is CPU-based (or it is not obvious how to made it GPU-based).. Slices, computing intersections.. That's not good, I suppose. The main question I got reading this article: Is it really useful for rendering simple objects like trees? I think that no. Only area I see where it may be applied - fluids rendering.. but again, because of 3D volume textures only the small areas may be rendered..
Some benchmarking is needed for such works... Interesting question arised for me: Is it faster, for example, than "Smoke" demo by nVidia (from nVidia DX10 SDK)?
P.S. Sorry for grumbling in this thread