Depending on the software, some optical scanners go directly from the point cloud to a generic solid or STL (which are surface only). Most cad I've dealt with can make a solid from a decent quality STL pretty easily though.
Way back in the day if we reverse engineered something, we had to use CMM data which came in as a raw point cloud. It created a lot of extra mouse-miles when starting from that. Some CAD programs though(like CoCreate) could actually build a decent curved surface from a point cloud. For other software (ProE, Solidworks, Inventor) we wrote some Macros to create meshes as reference geometry.
It's been a while since I haven't gotten at least an STL surface output from a scanner, but if points were the output I expect there's more tools available these days to speed up the process of generating a solid.
