There's also MeteorJS (http://meteor.com/) and others...

For the most part combining pub-sub (Redis or others) with a comet/websocket solution (socket.io, SignalR, etc) and and data entities (backbone, angular) that can be used with such a backend (observer) pattern isn't too difficult with the tools available.

Unfortunately there are a lot of options for each part of this, and getting a "right" solution is hard.. there are the auto-magical solutions like you mention, just the same... years of .Net dev make me leary of "magic". I prefer using the most mature/maturing parts and building something useful, like legos.