Sounds cool, but speaking from recent experience, the option to make the request from the server, parse it on the server, template it and deliver it was not available to me for the job I was asked to do (as a frontend developer).

Sometimes it comes down to doing it with client side AJAX, or not doing it at all.

With developers learning to do their jobs properly, sure when the luxury of time and starting a new site from scratch is on your side. And with backend developers and engineers ready to configure the ultimate content delivery mechanisms. But what of when you don't have that luxury? What then? Just decline the job? Maybe, but then someone else will come along and do the AJAX, and get paid because the content appears when the site loads every single time (provided JS is enabled ;-).