I agree. While I'm not as familiar with Ember, one of the things that has kept me from using Angular on more than a few complex pages, is that I would have to rewrite all of the otherwise-functional Handlebars templates we have made thus far. I've even done six or seven custom directives now, and have a feel for "the power of directives" (having heard that phrase a lot), but it certainly isn't what I use most of the time.

But this is all an aside from the point of "templates" in general.

When I think "templates" I tend to think first of something lightweight like Mustache or Handlebars templates, that I can render client-side (and server-side!) without worrying about anything beyond decorating HTML with a few curly-braces.