Meteor is about the UX.<p>The ease of getting up and running, the ease of tools, and the ease of deployment. On no React stack can you (and in the future this will be more simple) run<p><pre><code> meteor create my-react-project
npm init && npm install react
</code></pre>
And start coding JSX, ES2015/2016 immediately. There is a non-trivial amount of boilerplate and configuration you need to do to get this working my hand, and while it can provide a greater level of control, it undoubtedly adds to the overall weight of code you need to maintain.<p>Then hypothetically after some time of development, do<p><pre><code> meteor add-platform ios
meteor add-platform android
meteor add-platform desktop (this is theoretical currently, but there exist packages which do exactly this)
</code></pre>
And have Cordova iOS and Android builds, and an Electron desktop app. Then in a few weeks, do<p><pre><code> meteor deploy
</code></pre>
and have a fully monitored application up and running on AWS with Meteor's monitoring and deployment tools. Meteor's play is in the ease of these tools. It is absolutely non-trivial the amount of glue and knowledge you need to create, understand, and maintain the current (and ever-rapidly expanding) Javascript toolchain.<p>This announcement touches on one of their most thorny issues of being tightly coupled to Mongo. Adding this abstraction layer allowing any UI and any data source is Meteor's ticket to the masses.