Yeah I agree with you about deprecation. While couchDB may not be a good fit building large html applications for small applications show and list are invaluable.

Consider a diqus like platform. How cool it will be if formatted comments can be served directly from the database.

But she said that they will be available through plugins. So we will have to wait and see...

The node js addition is to leverage the speed of v8 engine that impacts only the view building time and not much else(I could be wrong though)