Perhaps the reporter misunderstood / was misinformed? From my understanding, with a few exceptions, the new IDN TLDs will be simply aliases to current TLDs. ICANN and company has been working on that for awhile.
Adding many thousands, let alone millions, of real (as opposed to say IDN aliases) TLDs would stress the root servers, and create a huge single point of failure for custom-vanity TLDs.
Many ISPs / resolvers cache the root server addresses and the corresponding TLD zone data, so if the roots are unavailable / busy or whatever, it's generally a situation that can be worked around - that won't be true in a custom-vanity TLD situation. The upshot being that traditional, popular TLDs would end up being more reliable in such instances.
And from a business aspect, such a scheme would in essance be a monopoly far worse than Internic ever was - because the root would directly be serving resource records (ie. name server addresses) for end-user domains in the custom-vanity TLDs.
Bottom line, in my view, is custom-vanity TLDs (a glorified keyword system) is unlikely to happen anytime soon, if ever.
Ron