Julia does support vectorization just like MATLAB, but I think what you may be referring to are some of the speed traps that currently exists where undesireable/unnecessary copies occur. This is often in practice the reason that writing devectorized code is better in Julia right now.

But, this issue is well-identified in the Julia dev community, and is on the roadmap for 0.3: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/4853