[joe_the_user]

OK,

The thing about this popular article is it seems to imply that the universe coming out of a black hole is different from it coming out from any kind of singularity.

Well, reading the real article, it seems this popular article got things garbled. The main problem they seem raise with the big bang is that it is a "naked" singularity - there's no barrier between the world and the singular point. So what they are doing is looking at a higher dimensional black hole and finding a non-naked singularity that would generate approximately the same effects as the big bang. There is still a singularity at work here, it is simply that the singularity is not directly spewing matter out. "No naked singularities" is a general principle I recall from scanning general relativity articles.