The article makes it seem like this technology will completely replace copper, which is obviously untrue. Silicon photonics for use in interconnects in multicores, though, is very promising purely from the perspective of bandwidth. HP and Intel have expressed interest, and there is a lot of academic research at Northwestern and UCSB ECE, for instance. I do not know what energy efficiency figures you were referring to, but emitter efficiency is dependent on the band gap and other properties of the semiconductor and lasing material, so the specific technology used does matter.
