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If you're operating in a 2D environment (i.e. inside) you can convert your point clouds to laser scans using the pointcloud_to_laserscan node. Then gmapping_slam will subscribe to the scan topic and it will work just the same as if a lidar was publishing it.

As for computational load, I've read about some people using the kinect with the ODROID-U3 for some tasks successfully, so I think it would be worth a shot for you to try it out to see if you can run all this on it, you might have some luck.