The async pipe to do asynchronous binding is pretty sweet. I think (if I remember correctly) they tried to do something like this by default in Angular 1 (i.e. wait until promises resolve and then display the result), but then they took it out because it was causing other issues. If you did want all your bindings to by async in Angular 2, though, I wonder if there is a way to set a global configuration option or something. That way you don't need to include the | async with each binding.