Exactly. His point, I think, was trying to get rid of the need for people pulling out a stylus in a car sitting in traffic and scribbling notes and smiley faces. Not catering to artists and people sitting in meetings taking notes. The iPhone doesn't need a stylus. A tablet (especially at that size) acts more like a blank canvas and it makes perfect sense to get a drawing tool like a pencil on that big surface to encourage even more apps and creative outlets.
You can already see it in action. Go to a Tesla showroom, a boutique clothier, a Square-enabled café, etc. They are all embracing the iPad as a multi-functional device. Oh, and those aren't usually even considered "enterprise" clients.
Isn't Backbone.js already 6.5kb, Packed and gzipped? Why is the stress put on making it smaller/modular? I don't think that is the problem at all. The problem is one that frameworks like Ember.js are trying to solve... reuseable, convention-based and opinionated. This is what Rails got right and something I think that client-side frameworks lack. Rails' success, for the most part, is due to its really strong opinions and conventions. These client-side "frameworks" are often brought in with the byline that its intent is to be TINY. To me, that's not what these ambitious JS frameworks should be bullet-pointing first.
This whole, "Ruby is slow," diatribe is just ridic.
Everyone here that has done any C/C++ or Ruby development would probably agree that if you're looking for number smashing, Ruby is just not cutting it unless you're into rockin' C extensions and getting what you want... for now.
Ruby, within a few years, will probably have some VM action, whether the JVM with JRuby or Rubinius wins out, who cares.
In any case, in like 5 or 6 years when we all have 50/100 core machines, Ruby's gonna be just fine for almost everything. Maybe by then we will be done arguing and just agree that Ruby is the nicest language to look at and develop in, even if it has subpar performance. Because if you're arguing something different, you've probably never gone from Ruby to C or Java or even Python... just so you all know, it blows.
As far as the root objects are concerned, I've always been a fan of that part of Rails. Not to say that it cannot be easily gotten rid of with something like this (for ActiveResource)...
ActiveResource::Base.include_root_in_json = false
Or, like in my example app, with this (for ActiveModelSerializers)...
Though, I understand the pain of coming from a server-side MVC architecture, I found it refreshing that Ember.js takes the "desktop" MVC approach. Our web apps are now living on the client, acting like desktop apps. Most people struggle with this reverse at first, but can conceptually catch on if shown the way. I think what really needs to happen is a good screencast or two walking through these concepts. I'm interested in putting something together and will when I have the time.