My impression is that the biggest difference is automated two-way bindings between views and models. Under Backbone, you have to do that binding manually. With Ember, this means that you don't have to always be explicitly triggering events to cause view re-rendering or invoking persistence callbacks from your views to trigger model saves.
The "computed properties" is also nice; it looks to enable the decorator pattern on models pretty trivially in the context of the two-way bindings, which generally does a lot for producing clean code.
My gut is that this is "Backbone biased towards a specific flavor of application design". Backbone is awesome, but by its own admission, is more of collective toolset than a full-blown framework. Ember looks like it's sort of a midpoint between Backbone's spartan foundation and Sproutcore's kitchen-sink framework. I'm excited to try it out.
The "computed properties" is also nice; it looks to enable the decorator pattern on models pretty trivially in the context of the two-way bindings, which generally does a lot for producing clean code.
My gut is that this is "Backbone biased towards a specific flavor of application design". Backbone is awesome, but by its own admission, is more of collective toolset than a full-blown framework. Ember looks like it's sort of a midpoint between Backbone's spartan foundation and Sproutcore's kitchen-sink framework. I'm excited to try it out.