I saw that same presentation at the same event, but came away with a very different impression: the container management they showed was implemented completely outside of docker itself, with no patches to the docker codebase needed. Also, IIRC it actually did use significant code from etcd for coordination.
It had no etcd in it and the POC was implemented as part of the Docker API/CLI, as best I recall. There were significant questions in the discussion about etcd not being there.
