They are slightly worse as the geometry is also unique, and polygons are able to compress surfaces much more efficiently than voxels. Unique geometry and surface properties per voxel are no different than megatextures. This redundancy decreases the required information by an order of magnitude at often no perceivable cost. Traditional texturing on the other hand allows to reuse the same texture pixel many times over the scene.
It led to huge game sizes while the perceived resolution remained low. The main reason is that storing unique colors for entire scenes was simply too much. This is a more efficient approach on having a unique color per scene element, but still was not efficient enough to compete with traditional texturing. In the polygon realm this also touches the question about use of unique texturing and megatextures, like in idTech5 and the game Rage. The equivalent question for polygon content would be, can we have all the detail we need from just geometry, can we go Reyes-style and rely on microgeometry? For some highly stylized games maybe, but if you want richer realistic environments this is out of the question. We can look again to the polygon world for an answer. Without texturing, each voxel needs to store color and other surface properties individually. The first question is whether it is necessary to texture voxels at all. I believe voxel content is no different than polygon content when it comes to memory restrictions, hence it should go through similar stages as restrictions relax. You may be wondering why is this relevant to voxel content. Even advanced techniques like virtual texturing or Megatextures still rely on this.
Enhancements like normal maps, or other maps used for physically based rendering, are extensions of this base principle. We currently live in this age of polygon graphics.
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