At the end of this presentation Dave seems to show that Angular2 is visibly faster than React. However, he tweeted after his talk:

Full disclosure: In my talk, I accidentally left the setTimeout() for the Angular2 demo at 0ms, while React was at 500ms.

Dave is a great speaker, btw. EDIT re timeouts: Well, that's disappointing! Gotta find the code and re-run it. I presume the point of the talk was still that ng 2.0 is at least as fast as react.