Splitting the Unit Delay
For example a delay of 0.75 sampling periods would have an impulse response like this (red squares sampled from the blue delayed sinc):



Time (horizontal axis) unit is sampling periods. That kind of a filter is not causal as there are non-zero samples at negative times. None of the samples is zero, no matter how far left or right you go. That's what they meant by spreading all over.

About your second question, I have no access to the paper but I know that such all-pass fractional delay filters can be made arbitrarily good (approaching sinc), and the latency increases as you increase filter order. If you want very short latency, you then will also have a very low-order filter, which is of very poor quality as it is completely missing the left side of the sinc. It is a tradeoff between quality and latency, and you probably don't want to trade away all quality.