But you can run it at different resolutions. Create areas of different biomes, then generate within them, allowing you to move between distinctive regions.
The question is how much do you have to elaborate at each step.
The impressive thing with Minecraft's generation, to me, is that it's incremental, and that you get the same chunks no matter what order they're explored in.
Tile-based solving doesn't lend itself well to that. Minecraft does tile-based solving as well, as I understand it, for structures such as mineshafts and strongholds, and still manages to make them generate the same each time regardless of how you approach it. But it does so by elaborates the whole, bounded structure when you first encounter it. It can only work because the structure is finite.
It's hard to build in relations spanning large areas in incremental generation, even something as simple as a river flowing downhill on an incrementally generated map.
But if there was a clever way to do it, it could go far beyond physical geography. Imagine a world like Dwarf Fortress, but where all the history wasn't pregenerated, but generated incrementally as you met people, read books, explored the world - and still turned out consistently with the same seed, just like you get the same stronghold in a given Minecraft world no matter what order you explore the chunks.
