The blog post only somewhat touches on it but I believe a key part of why this is so much faster is that it sounds like Vulkan is actually exposing tiled-based rendering. Note that PowerVR is a tile-based deferred renderer under the hood[1]. So if the app is doing the work of chunking draws into tiles instead of the driver trying to extract that from the OpenGL stream that's going to be significantly more efficient.
1: http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/a-look-at-the-powervr-graphic...
The demos is slightly unrealistic yes and you could use multi draw indirect. But you would not be able to use multiple cores with that. As for moving objects, you would really just need to handle the objects moving between tiles and pass the animation matricies in the right places. It was thought about, but we didn't have time to implement.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/android-to-support-vu...