if Angular is truly dropping the template into the DOM and then parsing the DOM, Angular is doing something terribly wrong. Underscore (for example) parses templates that look very similar to this by parsing the template as a string (not as DOM nodes). If it's crucial to parse the content as nodes, the top element (or a wrapper) can be constructed outside of the DOM itself and parsed as nodes outside the DOM tree. I haven't looked into how Angular does this parsing but I would be very surprised if this complaint is accurate.
Hold on there, cowboy. The innate superiority of strings over DOM based templating is not universally accepted. Because it's not unequivocally proven.
In fact, a few years ago there was an obvious tide toward experimenting with alternatives to string based templating noticeable in several some high profile efforts in the client side templating space.
Most templates will typically live in separate files and be loaded and compiled when needed, of course - so not so much of a performance hit up front. But Angular still needs to know where to dump the stuff, so it needs to parse the DOM to find a node with the ng-app directive.
Also, I'm not aware of anything like handlebars's offline pre-compilation for Angular, although such a thing may well exist. There's a lot of stuff in there...
