The vendor lock-in is simply false. Yes, it comes from Google, but it's open source and easily forked.<p>The main thing I like about Angular is the totally different approach to programming: it's much more declarative than the verbose imperative style of JQuery and many others. You can do great things in very little code sometimes.<p>The main downside is that a lot of the concepts are really quite complicated and badly explained. I still don't quite get why '@' and '=' are so fundamentally different, and how is '&' supposed to work. Most often, I need something that is not quite either of these, so I still end up adding my own $watchers and converting all the strings back to the type I actually need.