Right, but this still doesn't alleviate the need for "prerendering" specific pages for the crawler, which is the most tedious part of the whole thing. In other words, when a crawler requests /about, it should be getting a fully-formed About page with the content already in place, and not a bare container that ajax'es the content on page load (which is how most of pageless sites work).

Yeah - that sucks, but is actually also necessary for optimal performance for users as well. I don't think it's excusable to have two HTTP requests for page content. (and hash bangs are just as bad when loaded directly)