Its not really server side rendering at all in the traditional sense, its only used to provide an initial cache of data to serve an illusion of a faster initial

Its not really server side rendering at all in the traditional sense, its only used to provide an initial cache of data to serve an illusion of a faster initial load and its far from a thin client as you said. Needless to say its brilliant! I've applied the changes to atmosphere.meteor.com and the changes are very drastic (you'll have to allow the appcache to adjust if you've loaded it before). I think with this type of speed the drawbacks of using using meteor fall back further. If there was a way for templates not to be download to all at once in a similar way I'd find it difficult to find a use for server side rendering.