I prefer a flat ground + shaders like in the UE over an infinite number of identical dust grains.
Just look how awesome the cinematic ut3 characters look like or the high poly 1st perspective weapons, the vehicles in ut3,... that's really awesome.
Cloning ONE high detail palm a 10.000 times isn't that impressive, since it is gonna be very annoying if there is no variety in the objects in a game. A voxel based palm costs more memory than a polygon palm.
They are no game developers to deliver a better demonstration video, they say. Ok may be, but this also is a major problem of this engine. Lets see if anyone ever brings out a game/demo that doesn't lack that much in variety.
Hasn't to be 100.000 times better than other games.