We used this technique in the IE6 days (with settimeout nonetheless). We had a very big list that was being filtered as the user typed, and we would perform 10 dom operations (they were all creating and appending elements to the dom), then timeout for 15ms, then 10 more operations, etc. If the user changed the text, we would clear the most recent timeout which would stop the chain, it was very clean actually. I suppose with requestAnimationFrame it's a bit nastier as you 'd need like a __dirtyRequestStop boolean check to break the scheduling, but probably much more elegant performance wise.
The concept behind it, is that you give "air to the UI thread to breath". Basically instead of locking it for 100ms you lock it for less at the time, which is perceivable as just a delay, rather that the window completely freezing. Users would see the list progressively be created sometimes which was cool too, gave it a feeling of "this is doing some heavy work behind the scenes" without really doing much.
documentFragment also was used for constructing the elements before appending the fragment to the main element :) I am wondering if that technique has any merit today, since it really helped back then.
What is old will be new again :)