You are absolutely right when it comes to using ECMAScript 6 natively. It will officially become a standard in mid 2015. By then modern browsers should have implemented most of it, but it will be years until legacy browsers go away. It feels to me that (for most projects) we can just now rely on ECMAScript 5 being there everywhere.
On the other hand, there are already a few decent solutions for transpiling ECMAScript 6 to ES5 [1]:
* Traceur (there are Traceur-based plugins for Grunt, Gulp, browserify, webpack, etc.): https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler
* 6to5: https://6to5.org/
* es6-transpiler.js: https://github.com/termi/es6-transpiler
Using those tools results in a workflow that is much like using CoffeeScript.