Not really. TS existed well before Angular 2.0 which uses Typescript.
> Now, that React is beating angular
Nothing is "beating" anything. I see plenty "Angular jobs" where I live, I saw very little "React jobs". Doesn't mean that Angular is better than React, but again, it certainly proves that one isn't "beating" the other.
I'll tell you why I'm using Typescript : It makes maintaining large JS codebases easier and it is simpler than Babel's plugin model.