[Alexandervn]

Addy Osmani has a nice excercition [1] on the history of MVC in Developing Backbone.js Applications, where he states:

"Developers are sometimes surprised when they learn that the Observer pattern (nowadays commonly implemented as a Publish/Subscribe system) was included as a part of MVC's architecture decades ago. In Smalltalk-80's MVC, the View and Controller both observe the Model: anytime the Model changes, the Views react."

So, not really new actually.

[1]: http://addyosmani.github.com/backbone-fundamentals/#mvc