Not to rain on Backbone's parade, but I am easily twice as productive in angular.js. The learning curve is a bit steeper but once you mastered you end up with (IMO) a cleaner more maintainable app.
The view is written in HTML, you declare the bindings with moustache-style templates or with attributes. Some people get really hung up on this, but the declarative UI is not Turing complete, so it's not really like embedding PHP at all.
By the way, I like Backbone too, and I use Underscore everywhere. Congratulations to all involved on reaching an important milestone and creating tons of value for everybody.
Then the examples on the site are really misleading, given that they hardcode the controller name in the example views.
EDIT:
To give an example of what I object to, this is cut and pasted from the Angular homepage:
<div ng-controller="TodoCtrl">
<span>{{remaining()}} of {{todos.length}} remaining</span>
[ <a href="" ng-click="archive()">archive</a> ]
<ul class="unstyled">
<li ng-repeat="todo in todos">
<input type="checkbox" ng-model="todo.done">
<span class="done-{{todo.done}}">{{todo.text}}</span>
</li>
</ul>
<form ng-submit="addTodo()">
<input type="text" ng-model="todoText" size="30"
placeholder="add new todo here">
<input class="btn-primary" type="submit" value="add">
</form>
</div>
This is what I meant about tight coupling to the views.
To answer your specific concerns, you can in fact imperatively bind Angular controllers to route views in the app's configuration block. However, this approach doesn't always make sense—you can have multiple apps in a page, each app having multiple controllers, so they can't all use the URL as the engine of application state. In cases like this you can your view as a directive, and then you can inject the appropriate controller (in fact this is exactly how ng-view works with the router).
Or, you can take the approach quoted above, and use an XML-like declarative configuration language to describe the view and its relationship to whatever happens to be its controller, and let the compiler generate the appropriate HTML for you. (I'm kidding, it's HTML all the way. But in Angular, the view describes its own structure, appearance and behavior, the controller is concerned with mutating state and not DOM manipulation.)
I'm not trying to evangelize, just put some good information out there. Backbone's templates, as I recall, use ERB-style syntax to push values and imperative code into templates, which then set up their models (http://backbonejs.org/#FAQ-bootstrap). I think you agree it would be unfair to put down Backbone as the new PHP based on that fact that its templates let you write in that style.
Enjoy!
Or would it be a hybrid of Backbone + Angular?
Would love to hear the opinion of someone more experienced.
Regarding Backbone + Angular in a large project, I wouldn't touch that code base with a 10 foot stick.
I wish it was advertised more what large projects using Angular and that they are actually architected completely with Angular.