> Almost all the sites I'll develop take advantage of progressively enhanced components or at minimum, widgets that are bootstrapped server side. Angular wants you to load everything via AJAX - that can get heavy very quickly.

I'm surprised that I haven't seen a library for any JavaScript framework that elegantly handles loading JSON returned within a server-side template. It seems like the best of both worlds - use your server-side template, but then also get the data as JSON so that you don't have to do a second request to populate your Angular $scope with data.

The easy way to implement this would be a library that automatically added <script> tags containing the JSON that you could then reference from your Angular template. It could even wrap the JSON in an Angular module of some sort to keep your global namespace from being polluted.