My original request was neither of both, not planes, not cards - instead, simply scatter textures, without having to deal with the surface displacement or other objects. It's often available in other packages and renderers: load a few texture files, randomize positions/scale/rotation, set border blend values, maybe randomize hue and saturation.
I thought about placing cards but you'd probably have no border blending and I guess it takes some additional rendertime to displace the cards according to the underlying surface. All of this sound rather cumbersome... and even if possible it's above my head.
I'm recreating the landscape as good as I can with noise nodes and a few surface layers... it works but I'd rather used satellite textures for more realism.
Anyways, I hope it's going to be added, there seems to be interest