I still have to do a mental mapping between this and what will ultimately be generated: HTML. Since JSX is XHTML, the mapping is minimal. This also moves in the direction of web components, which is getting a lot of attention from the Chrome team lately.
I'm pretty sure that's mostly fairly simple habituation. This is something that's unfamiliar at first - though not hard - and that slows you down. But you'll get used to it really quickly.
Syntax like this tends not to matter very much in my experience. What does matter is syntax changes that affect order dependence, and particularly nesting. Those really require changing the way you think - replacing one symbol with another is just a matter of plain & simple practice.
