I think strongly typed views are an area where things fall down due to lack of guidance rather than design. I don't think a view model is the same thing as the model in MVC.

In my MVC apps, I use them pretty much exclusively, but they exist completely independently from my application model (they represent compositions thereof). This really only makes sense in apps of a certain scale, though, so having the option not to use them, or to use dynamic views (not sure if they count as strongly typed, but they are a weird middle ground) is definitely useful.