We may look at that too and try to figure something out. Elements can be designed to have any property you might want. The queue in the talk is just one example of how to find out about a property of an element. Many routers use routing protocols that alter the routing table quite often. Writing a new configuration takes less than 15 milliseconds.
Cisco has their own software infrastructure.
From talking to them, their routers are not as modular for out of the box solutions. Linux and BSD router code is mixed in with the rest of the kernel. Soft timers schedule timed events by checking for timer expiration in frequently executed parts of the kernel. Checking for timer expiration in the kernel reduces context switch and cache overhead compared to traditional hardware-based timers which interrupt when the event occurs. Techniques like rate-based clocking of TCP connections and network polling that suffer from the high overheads of hardware based timers on high speed networks become practical with soft timers.