Slow template rendering only matters if your pages are heavily personalized for each user. Stick Varnish in front the page and serve over 2,500 request/sec and use whatever framework you are most comfortable with.
It is as silly as saying anyone programming in a JVM language is just programming in Java, or anyone using a language which compiles to machine code is just using assembler. (implicitly of course!)
obviously it depends on the share of time the one spends tweaking generated code and the compiler's codegen.
That said, it's a young project, and things can be a bit rocky. Including compilation in your deployment process is also a pain; do not kid yourself about that. It's kind of "industrial strength" in general; unless you care about how many PHP requests you can squeeze out of a unit of hardware, HipHop doesn't have much to offer.