I don't know if that will work.
4.6 is brand new and I'm not too familiar with how the new UI components work yet.
I think the Image component way is fine as long as there's not too many of them.
From the looks of the script, it doesn't seem like it's optimized to not draw fully transparent images, though this is the recommended way of setting it up in the new UI, according to official Unity tutorials (which don't always give the best advice for some reason).
But even if you can't see it, it's still telling the GPU to draw a transparent box. And if you have lots and lots of these things, it can add up to slow down your game.