Holo Launcher has 3 pages for the dock that you can swipe left or right to access. 3 pages and it looks like you can have 9 slots per page.
He's looking for something that opens up like a page from the bottom, not a swipeable row of icons. Nova and Apex already do what you mentioned.
As far as I know, I don't know of any launcher that does that. Maybe Action Launcher by the TweetLanes guy? I recall something similar, like, swiping from off-screen to from left to right to access a list of apps, or something. Might be worth checking out.