I agree with React being geared more towards interactive UI components, but on the other hand you could use Ractive with WebComponents/Polymer instead of MDV to get all this powerful component lifecycle.
Still working on a solution that mix Backbone for core models + Polymer for view lifecycle and custom elements + Ractive for awesomeness updating.
The only concern I have is that some people do not like to use logicless.. I think React is powerful for letting you declare full javascript evaluations and expressions on your template code and giving you more flexible/productive way of writing.
The JavaScript expression is parsed into an AST, and references to parts of the data model are extracted so they can be dependency tracked and evaluated against the right context. Quite hard to explain concisely but I think it does what you're after.
Still working on a solution that mix Backbone for core models + Polymer for view lifecycle and custom elements + Ractive for awesomeness updating.
The only concern I have is that some people do not like to use logicless.. I think React is powerful for letting you declare full javascript evaluations and expressions on your template code and giving you more flexible/productive way of writing.