At GeoSLAM (joint venture with CSIRO) we sell scanners and software based on the Zebedee (ZEB1) and a mechanically rotating version (the ZEB-REVO [1]).
The rotating version is easier to use (don't have to worry about nodding the head too fast or too little) while still having the same cost/speed advantages over terrestrial scanners.
Talk of tag/DB based file systems always reminds me of WinFS[1]. Microsoft were trying to build a tag (well relational database) backed file system since 1990... eventually abandoned - presumably due to back-compat issues.
[1] http://www.tabulator.info/