8mm slice thickness isn't particularly at odds with what is commonly done on commercial machines, though usually there is a second transverse scan (which can't be readily fused due to patient movement).
But even if it were, plenty of interesting structures are many centimeters in size, a thousand fold decrease in costs from eliminating cryogenic / high power magnets could be very useful.
the structures are many centimeters, but I assume that the sort of anomalies you'd be looking for in a clinical scan aren't going to be that large.
if you had a fracture/tumor/damage-of-some-type that's small enough to fit between those slices and you didn't get the slices lined up just right the scan would miss it, no?
very cool, but is it clinically useful if one edge of your voxel is 8mm?