From a React newbies's perspective, the React community is much more in the es6 camp than Typescript. Many of the starter kits are in es6. It's not a huge deal.
I actually write most of my front-end code these days in Aurelia, which is written in es6, but they actually have type annotations which Babel knows how to deal with. So basically the tooling can auto-generate the *.d.ts files for you.
That said, Typescript natively supports React syntax through TSX files, which is nice.
Shameless plug: When we've started switching to TypeScript and was looking for a good starter, we've couldn't find any that we've liked so we've created & open sourced our own. Maybe it can help people who are considering using TypeScript with React: https://github.com/barbar/vortigern
I actually write most of my front-end code these days in Aurelia, which is written in es6, but they actually have type annotations which Babel knows how to deal with. So basically the tooling can auto-generate the *.d.ts files for you.
That said, Typescript natively supports React syntax through TSX files, which is nice.