Personally, the two big draws to me of Angular were "free" (as in, I don't have to write much code) DOM<->data binding, and the explicit goal of testability.

As a learning exercise, I wrote a page using just jquery, rewrote it in backbone, and then rewrote it in angular. Backbone helped me separate concerns; Angular helped me do that while writing _way_ less code, since I didn't have to manage keeping the DOM and the JS model in sync.