Limit recursion depth with GCI

So, i'm just playing around with recursion depth with GCI and I stumbled up on this thread

http://www.indented.co.uk/2010/01/22/limit-recursion-depth-with-get-childitem/

I'm not fully understanding on how this is working..  

It would be cool if GCI was built with the -todepth parameter, but this isn't happening.. 

What's the best way to limit recursion depth

I've seen people do something like gci c:\windows\*\*\*    That seems kind of hoaky to me.

Any thoughts on how people are doing this would be great.

Thanks