The NIC gives you an array (ring buffer) of pointers to structs (packets). Interleaving them into SOA format would probably cost more than any speedup from SIMD.
I can see how this approach described is "vector-like", even if the vector is this... imaginary unit that's parallelizing over the branch predictor instead of an explicit SIMD-code.
This "vector" organization probably has 99.999%+ branch prediction or something, effectively parallelizing the concept. But not in the SIMD-way. So still useful, but not what I thought originally based on the title.
(also, x86-64 CPUs with good gather instructions are rare, and sibling comments show that this is aimed at lower end CPUs. That makes SIMD even less relevant.)
And VPP is targeting high-end system and uses plenty of AVX512 (we demonstrated 1TBps of IPsec traffic on Intel Icelake for example). It's just very scalable to both small and big systems.