The Angular Tutorial App is an excellent demonstration of Angular's off-the-shelf features. In fact, it's designed precisely to demonstrate Angular's strengths. Angular reduces boilerplate but it's a heavier, more opinionated framework. The price you typically pay for less boilerplate is higher complexity when you need to alter the framework to fit your needs.

This is an extremely common (neccesary?) tradeoff. Think Rails vs. Sinatra or Django vs. Flask. Django gives you a great off-the-shelf backend that's perfectly suitable for most jobs. But I don't want to go under the hood to bend Django to fit an atypical project, and for those I'll use a minimal framework like Flask.

My issue with Angular is that I really want to avoid looking under the hood because the complexity is so high. Backbone is just a small, modular, well-documented library that invites you to look under the hood. If Angular doesn't fit my project, I'm happy to have Backbone in my toolkit, and I know the additional boilerplate up front will pay off down the road. Yes, it'll force me to think more up front about how to organize and architect my app, and that's not a bad thing.