This is amazing. John Carmack has become like the Lone Ranger of code optimization. He shows up out of nowhere, makes your game run 20 times faster, then rides off into the sunset. "Who was that masked man?" "Oh, he's John Carmack."
He's actually available in Fallout 1, 2, 3, 4, and New Vegas. :)
Game world is not only de-facto voxels. Its transparent, masked and oblique voxels that interact with each other or other entities, like farm blocks by water blocks, lava blocks with burnable blocks nearby, plants growing up, hostile mobs spawns and lines of sights, mobs pathing as they follow player, fellow mobs or random points of interest for wandering, etc ect.
The combination of using Java and being coded naively means that there's a huge amount of pointer chasing and unnecessary dynamic memory allocation that can be easily cut out without even needing to dip into the data structures and algorithms literature to try for asymptotic improvements. There's no SIMD and no concern for cache locality. Last time I checked, it didn't even look like terrain generation was done in a separate thread from the interactive game logic, let alone in multiple threads. The game only simulates dynamics within ~128 blocks of a player, but if you've got two players miles apart they're still simulated on the same thread.
I do fully understand that the dynamic modifiability of Minecraft's game world means that it is always going to be hungry for memory bandwidth and will be latency-sensitive. But that doesn't mean it has to be inefficient. The Pocket Edition (not Java) already showed that huge improvements are possible, because they were necessary to get anything resembling Minecraft onto mobile platforms. There's a lot more that can be done when you're back on a platform that has sufficient RAM capacity and a ton more CPU power relative to RAM speed. There's a lot of latency that can be eliminated and a lot more than can be hidden from the user without breaking the game. The development process meant that hardly any of the early fundamental implementation decisions were made with the much later features in mind.
But that's the absolute worst case, nobody actually plays the game like that.
Multiplayer gets much worse though, god forbid you have several people exploring new terrain on a server.
And god forbid you play with any of the mods that add faster railways[1] or jetpacks[2] or boots that make you walk faster[3], etc. It's a bummer that the optimizations are coming to the less moddable version, MC is a great platform for people to build new gameplay on.
[1] http://ftbwiki.org/Railcraft