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Just one nitpick, Arnold supports the same BSSRDF profiles and has been used for realistic skin rendering in movies. The gaussian profile is actually suitable for rendering realistic skin, by using a combination of multiple gaussians you can very accurately match measured human skin profiles.

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Yeah, such profiles can certainly be used for skin rendering. I know that SPI used the method you mentioned on a few movies. There will be visible flaws though. The skin and especially the lips will look too waxy when using gaussians or bicubics. Weta Digital used Quantized Diffusion on Promotheus for this reason [1]. Pixar has an upcoming talk on a simple, yet highly accurate BSSRDF profile this SIGGRAPH, so let's hope the folks at Blender will implement that in Cycles.

[1] http://www.fxguide.com/featured/prometheus-rebuilding-hallow...