Class-based generic view is a nice addition. I remember when I was learning Django and going through the official tutorial, that was one part that took me a while to understand. Kudos guys!
No, you can make your own class based views with the 1.3 codebase. The docs describe them as replacing Generic Views, but nothing stops you from creating your own class hierarchy that inherits from the base TemplateView (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/class-based-views/#...)