I had come to the same conclusion as I'm very sympathetic to the React mindset, and thought that combining the d3 "math-y bits" with React as a rendering engine might be the very best of both worlds.
But the one thing that I couldn't find a good solution to, was transitions/animations as data changes. Support for transitions in d3 is quite impressive (often just calling .transition() on your selection) and I couldn't find nearly as nice a solution with React, though chenglou[0] seems to be making continuous progress.