Yeah, I saw the picture and couldn't figure out what was so special for a while either, until I reread it and realized it wasn't a photo. That's incredible.
Bert Monroy is astounding. I highly recommend his book "Photoshop Studio with Bert Monroy". Very interesting... caused me to take a more creative look at my Photoshop work.
Although, my art teacher attended the Photoshop Expo and he listened to one of that guy's presentations and said he was a total freak.
And is that piece worth spending 2000 hours on? I don't think so. Sure, it's realistic, but too much so to the point that a picture would have sufficed. And it's not all that artistic or creative, either...
My guess is that he took a pano photo at the location and then pathed out the whole thing in Illustrator/Photoshop. He then used those 2 programs to recreate the entire scene. I also suspect that he took tons of smaller location reference photos to refer to while working on small details.