In fact, a few years ago there was an obvious tide toward experimenting with alternatives to string based templating noticeable in several some high profile efforts in the client side templating space.
See http://modernweb.com/2014/03/24/string-templating-considered... for a recent overview that is pretty decent. Boris Moore did a lot of publishing about it, as I recall.
Most templates will typically live in separate files and be loaded and compiled when needed, of course - so not so much of a performance hit up front. But Angular still needs to know where to dump the stuff, so it needs to parse the DOM to find a node with the ng-app directive.
Also, I'm not aware of anything like handlebars's offline pre-compilation for Angular, although such a thing may well exist. There's a lot of stuff in there...