I think the one thing holding it back has been the lack of a basic tutorial. I really found it quite hard to wrap my head around the concepts for this reason. There will be a book coming out later this year I believe; in the meantime hopefully this ongoing tutorial series will help get folks started.
I'll be posting part 3 of the video tomorrow. Let me know if you have any suggestions or questions.
As a designer, the initial data-binding and directives felt like I was performing magic, although there was a steep-ish learning curve as soon as I left trivial examples.
I feel like there is a lot of momentum building behind Angular, and is a great model to start thinking about now for when browsers support web components (https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw-file/tip/explainer/...) (what will that be HTML6?)
For someone coming to Angular fresh (with only some basic jQuery knowledge) I also found it easier to learn/work in coffeescript.
AngularJS is not new to the mainstream JavaScript community - but it is to many others who can derive a lot of benefit from it. Good see to a tutorial to get such folks up and running quickly with it.
BTW - if you prefer text to video, here is a related post from the authors blog:
http://jphoward.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/end-to-end-web-app-...