Let me get this straight-- it's just a table embedded into a table recursively right?
Yeah...I'm not sure why that's a big deal...
For zooming in on an image, you still have to have a high res image and for all the small images they either have to be all loaded on the front end or loaded as you zoom in on them so you're going to have to take the time to load those at some point.
-edit-
And the point of the last paragraph isn't to say it's bad, it sounds great for something like a PDF where I load it all at once and it sticks in memory, but for something on the web or for larger things on the PSP, I'm not sure how fantastic it is.
It's smooth because all those things are loaded and in memory. If you're doing it on a webpage, you would have to load all those images at once, which for a big enough table, that could take a noticeable amount of time. If you're doing it on something like a PSP, I don't know what the memory of the PSP is, but considering the PS3 crashes if you have several flash movies running in multiple windows, I would assume the PSP doesn't have a giant amount of memory either. It might work for comics where the table isn't large, but for things with a large table and large images, I don't know if it could handle those.