I don't know how fundamental the problem is in terms of fixing it, but it is fundamental in making mobile webapps. I remember making an auto-complete friend selector a while ago (the kind that filters as you type) - I had the JS filtering through names in less than 10ms, but the resulting DOM updates immediately brought every keypress to around 400ms, which is visibly slow, and worse, laggy.

I started work on a canvas-powered alternative before giving up - but I'm glad to see the React Canvas has gone with it. When I have some free time I'll be playing around with it to see if it lives up to the hype.