Angular's got a lot of great ideas, but the key difference is how you build with React.
Angular's directives are pretty similar conceptually to React components, yes. But Angular requires you to imperatively manipulate the DOM in its linking functions, whereas with React you declaratively specify how you want your component to look and when it changes state the framework computes the fastest DOM manipulations for you, which we think saves you some work and is often more performant.
If I had thorough benchmarks available I'd provide them, but sadly benchmarking things correctly is a lot of work and I just don't have time :/ You could try to play around with both frameworks' TodoMVC examples with Chrome's devtools to compare them, though.
Angular douesn't require you to use linking functions. They aren't necessary for 90% of the time when you can just use a template and a controller. It would be interesting if you provided an example in React of something that did require a linking function in Angular.
Angular's directives are pretty similar conceptually to React components, yes. But Angular requires you to imperatively manipulate the DOM in its linking functions, whereas with React you declaratively specify how you want your component to look and when it changes state the framework computes the fastest DOM manipulations for you, which we think saves you some work and is often more performant.
If I had thorough benchmarks available I'd provide them, but sadly benchmarking things correctly is a lot of work and I just don't have time :/ You could try to play around with both frameworks' TodoMVC examples with Chrome's devtools to compare them, though.