I used to struggle to answer this when talking to Angular folks about React. Then I came across a situation where I needed to recursively build a DOM tree based

I used to struggle to answer this when talking to Angular folks about React. Then I came across a situation where I needed to recursively build a DOM tree based on complicated calculations on a per-node basis and also calculated values at the top level. If I'd been doing it with ng-repeat, the logic would be split confusingly (and unnecessarily) between the template and the controller, and I'd need to pass down any information from the top-level ancestor manually. In React, I just create a renderNode method that's called by render at the top level, and renderNode on non-terminal nodes returns <div>{children}</div> where children is a map whose mapping function returns this.renderNode. The entire algorithm is grokkable at a single glance, and there's no need to create Directives to add any fancy features or special cases in the future. No need to read pages of documentation about ng-repeat and its intricacies; it's all just Javascript. Yes, Angular "just works." But React "just works" the first time you try it.