Exactly. The best piece of supporting evidence for my original point is that even Google themselves, in all of their Web Components marketing, used Polymer for everything. To the point where some people didn't really even understand the distinction between the two! That was a giant admission that this stuff is useless without databinding.
Of course it's a framework, it provides a data-binding system that is incompatible with other frameworks, and which isn't simply a polyfill.