That's true, although many of the core backbone components have been significantly modified/basically completely rewritten, keeping a fair amount of similarity with the backbone APIs but extending them too, for example:

* Views have declarative data bindings for updating your html with model data automatically; out of the box, sensible render and remove methods just work; collection rendering is easy.

* Models have explicitly declared properties and types, as well as evented + cached derived/computed properties. You can access model properties without .get('name') and .set('name', value) and events and things just work.