The differences to me with React + Redux, is you have far fewer surprises, it's easier to refactor and fewer wtf's per day. I spent a month working on a relatively small ng2 app and only had one single day without a weird "wtf" moment.
I've done several apps with ng1, and can't count the wtf's... with React + Redux, far fewer wtfs, and beyond that, far easier to jump into an existing app and find what I need to change. Can never say the same about ng1 and ng2 isn't much better than ng1 in that regard. In the end, I'd rather start with a boilerplate and build with React + Redux over ng1 or ng2.
Yes, there is webpack + babel (you need a transpiler for ng2, and should use a build tool regardless), the tooling around react + redux isn't too bad, and significantly smaller still than getting started in even a medium complexity app in ng.
That seems to be required when mentioning React since you can't learn just React, you have to learn React + at least 5 other things to get the same featureset of Angular 2.