Am I interpreting this correctly as teaming these NICs on the ESXi side in conjunction with Port Channeling on the Cisco switch side will result in increased throughput, not just the benefit of a redundant link?
Yes, you're correct... in situation where a single VM communicate with multiple targets, the VM can use more bandwidth that an single physical NIC can provide... but the bandwidth for each single connection if the same of each physical NIC.
Anyway, my recommendation is to use LBT instead of IP-Hash with Port Channel on Cisco side... see the following links for some additional comments:
IP-Hash versus LBT - frankdenneman.nl
» Etherchannel and IP Hash or Load Based Teaming? Long White Virtual Clouds