Point clouds are not very useful themselves, if we had a choice we would skip them. They are the result of turning any measured data (like pictures or depth samples or whatever) into a 3d visualisation.
Ideally you have collected enough data to reconstruct the surface geometry with reasonable accuracy, but realistically often you don't.
Our minds are rather good at inferring surface geometry from point clouds, our algorithms not so much yet as far as I know. So sometimes (as in the case of this visualisation) it suffices to show people just the point cloud.
