No, Vue's templates do not allow arbitrary JS. The syntax is very Angular-like, in the sense that everything is pseudo-html using custom tags and attributes. But the builtins are extremely well thought out and in practice I rarely find myself having to re-implement much of anything that's not application specific, and most of those things I'm grateful to implement once and be done with it instead of having to reimplement in JS for every component that needs it.

There is more of a learning curve, in the sense that it only took me 1-2 hours to feel like I fully understood JSX and maybe a day and a half to feel like I fully understood Vue templates. I, personally, don't find that argument very compelling. ~10 dev hours is a rounding error over the lifetime of a project, and anyway I spent at least that much time researching and/or reinventing JSX conventions and idioms that are obvious or trivial in any real templating DSL. I only had to climb the conceptual hill once for each framework, and the view from the top is much nicer in Vue.

As an aside, Vue actually supports JSX out of the box. Any component can optionally include a `render` function that's almost exactly like React's `render`, and it falls back to using Vue templates only if no `render` is specified. Anecdotally, though, there is only a single component in our entire application where the team decided it was cleaner in JSX than with a template.