To that end, I wonder if the virtual DOM aspect of React could/should be broken out into its own library. You could have different templating languages up front to suit different use cases/programming styles, but each would be converted to DOM in the fastest way possible by React's renderer.

There are so many awesome things that React's model enables (like live editing with react-hot-loader). It would be awesome if the next generation of templating languages could inherit them for effectively free.