Seeing as you can obviously use technology to not worry about extra angle bracket syntax and closing tags, I don't see why you need to hide them in order to achieve that. I'm surprised by the number of people who want to strip out visual cues like that. To me, that makes life harder.
Precisely. The abstraction removes human error. Coffeescript is a great example: it lets me forget about extra commas in an array, or semicolons. Jquery is another: it lets me forget about the inconsistencies between certain browsers with, for example, Ajax.
