Exactly. Having a "watered-down template language" is a good thing.

The problem is arguably that the indirection is really, really costly. Just today I wrote a custom template tag I needed in order to factor out some functionality common to every view on my application. In RoR it would have been maybe 2 lines, but that custom tag was more like 15.

I still adore Django for its efforts to remove all the "magic" code, though.