I've only looked at it but I know people who are into it and I'm not aware of Angular compiling anything. There's this crap they do with the "DOM-compiling" or whatever but that has little to do with rewriting JS or compiling AFAIK. That's just Google engineers wanting to feel like they have their big boy pants on when they talk about their JS framework.
Yeah, I know this. You wouldn't be able to step through your code in browser dev tools otherwise.
The DOM manipulation stuff is one of the features which sold me on Angular. I love the idea that everything renders itself then responds to a single redraw event fired on the DOM so that reflow happens once rather than the hideous way many people use jQuery to do things like:
var div = $('div').appendTo('.home');
var ul = $('ul').appendTo(div);
$('li').appendTo(ul);
