As opposed to just dumping the memory cards in the truck? (which somehow seems... simpler :) )

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996)

CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding) and MPLS [wikipedia.org] (Multiprotocol Label Switching) use flow control. The perform a lookup on the first packet, cache the information in a forwarding table and all further packets which are part of the same flow are switched, not routed, at effectively wire speeds.

It's more than that. The older techologies ("fast switching" in the Cisco world) used to do this - route first packet, then switch the other packets in the flow. However, CEF goes one step forward, and allows for all the packets to be switched by the hardware (not even the first packet in the flow hits the router processor). Which means that what the author seems to be suggesting would actually mean moving backwards.
Either there is more to the router than the article says, or the author hasn't been keeping track of developments in this field...

I agree with you on both counts - yes, we are very unlikely to exhaust the IPv6 address space in this century. And yes, we are very likely to run out of MAC addresses first.

But this doesn't mean that "we will never run out of addresses"...