What if you add another sphere with displace modifier with that texture, and then use the Boolean modifier on the outer sphere to subtract the raised bits to get the hole shapes?
@shoppe, cool I only used the cast modifier once, following a tutorial, I’ll have to go back to see how that baby works more. The lattice part of the stack was my least favorite. But without it the shrinkwrap projection wasn’t even close. Nice change. Don’t forget if you are printing to turn of flat shading so you don’t have a false sense of how smooth it is. You may need to add (and apply ultimately) one or more subsurfs at the very end.