One of the other innovations of Minecraft is that they didn't worry too much about rendering chunks in a timely manner. When you're on multiplayer and moving fast its not uncommon for the landscape to get rendered right infront of your eyes. Some games go to great lengths to avoid that (e.g. slow the player down or have distance fog so that they never notice areas being loaded). But if the game is fun, no-one cares about hiding the loading.