Yeah, the author addresses some of this in the "Apples to Apples" section but doesn't get into details. I'd be interested to see which combination of smaller packages works well to achieve similar capabilities.
I'll definitely do a future post on this topic. I've been thinking about doing it with the analogy of a food/wine pairing and going into which server side frameworks play well with client side frameworks in addition to the client side libraries that work well together. For example, emberjs and rails or knockout, sammyjs, durandaljs and .net web api on the server etc...