[bstrong]

This doesn't make any sense at all to me for generating dynamic html, since the whole page load will be stalled while you run your db queries. Most sites run many queries to generate a page, at least some of which need to be done serially, so you're adding (300ms + WAN latency) * (num serial queries) to the page load time.

If you have a pure ajax app that's directly hitting the db, then it starts to make some sense, as this isn't too much slower than it would be to hit your own service backed by a local db (though 300ms is definitely on the slow side for queries). This seems to be the use case they're aiming for given the focus on end-user authentication.