Also is this a good direction for "mobile first" approach? What about platform independence? (iOS/Android/Desktop agnostic, etc, etc). (bootstrap? phonegap?)
In comparison with Backbone/JQuery, React is more declarative. It encourages the developer to describe the structure of the UI in a given state and let the engine handle the transitions between states. It's possible to use Backbone models and events with React views with very little impedance mismatch.
I would like to hear an Ember expert's perspective.
React Native has an interesting approach to mobile-first development. The general philosophy is "learn once, write anywhere" instead of "write once, run anywhere". Most apps cannot make the most of their platform while being truly platform-independent, but unifying component lifecycle behavior between platforms could end up being easier on developers than learning the particulars of each platform, while producing a better result than a PhoneGap-style wrapper.
I just wish we had a non-proliferation treaty on Flux frameworks.
For example, I like Fluxible because it lets you do server side rendering, and it avoids singletons, so it's exceptionally easy to test.
However, if I'm working on an app that doesn't have any public facing components, I'd probably consider a different implementation that is less verbose.
https://github.com/spoike/refluxjs
[Edit added link to Reflux]
Of course, it took way longer to put together a good stack. I spent months pushing React and trying to learn the best practices there.
I did end up with something relevant though. I built Reapp: http://reapp.io
It's really a bunch of things in one, but I think it's hugely overlooked for being an awesome bootstrapping method for getting a full-featured React app up and running. You can have your app running with hot reloads, ES6, cordova-builds, flux, etc all in minutes with a single command. And of course it includes an awesome (IMO) UI kit to boot.