So baked into this is lack of support for clients without javascript.
I guess I understand if this is a conscious lack of support for the many lynx/noscript/etc users out there (I'm not going to do that myself and so the architecture is not an option).
But what about search engine crawlers, hasn't javascript + search always been an issue?
The future started more than two years ago, actually. You can experimentally verify it for yourself -- my understanding is that they use a combination of heuristics and actual evaluation.
For example, putting an invisible div on your web page stuffed with keywords is usually a one way trip to smackdown city. Put an invisible div on your web page and make it visible in response to pushing a button and they will index the content much of the time. They are known to spend extra resources to make sure popular techniques do not cause their algorithms to break. (From a SEO perspective I'd suggest being one step behind the cutting edge on innovations like that. 100% JSON site? Cutting edge, probably uncrawlable. Shopping cart rendered using Prototype? Works fine.)
http://redhanded.hobix.com/-h/hoodwinkDDayOneForcingTheHostT...
And there was another framework that did essentially the same thing, using DHTML and AJAX to create the page from a blank slate. But I cannot recall the name.
HAppS (a Haskell framework) has also advocated this:
"HAppS does not come with a server-side templating system. We prefer the pattern of developing static web pages and using AJAX to populate them with dynamic content."