Sproutcore doesn't sound much like Smalltalk MVC. In "Applications Programming in Smalltalk-80(TM): How to use Model-View-Controller (MVC)" by Steve Burbeck, which describes how Smalltalk did it, it says:

   In the MVC paradigm the user input, the modeling of the
   external world, and the visual feedback to the user are
   explicitly separated and handled by three types of object,
   each specialized for its task. The view manages the graphical
   and/or textual output to the portion of the bitmapped display
   that is allocated to its application. The controller interprets
   the mouse and keyboard inputs from the user, commanding the model
   and/or the view to change as appropriate. Finally, the model
   manages the behavior and data of the application domain, responds
   to requests for information about its state (usually from the view),
   and responds to instructions to change state (usually from the controller).

http://st-www.cs.illinois.edu/users/smarch/st-docs/mvc.html

Looking at the Sproutcore diagram given in the article, it looks like that in Sproutcore input goes to the view, which then decides to pass it to the controller. In Smalltalk it sounds like input goes straight to controllers--views have no idea input happened unless a controller tells them about it.

It's not quite clear to me from the article, but it also looks like maybe the view gets what the information about what to display from the controller (which gets it from the model). In Smalltalk it sounds like the controller would tell the view that the view needs to update, and the view would talk directly to the model to get the data it needs.