My guess is the performance benchmarks would be much different if you are dealing with an app with a high number of nodes where the diff/repainting benefits of React really kick in.
Moreover it gives you the option between declaratively specifying the DOM to imperatively manipulating it when you need to for performance reasons.
It's a tiny library and the approach is much more efficient than diffing the virtual DOM for the entire page, so I'm pretty confident that results would actually be even better in larger apps.