Is there an 'analagous initiative' in React? No.

Can you end up with the same result in React? Yes.

There are people doing this in React, but each team needs to do it slightly differently because their app is setup differently. There are guides and examples on how to do it, but unless you setup your project exactly like the original author, you'll have to figure out portions of it on your own.

On top of that, you won't know if the modules that you are using will play well with the offline rendering.

The convention-driven approach IS the product... You make it sound like that is just a little bit of polish, maybe a page or two of documentation... But it took over a year of planning and architecture to make all of the changes. (There was a great demo of fastboot a year ago) Because of the planning and framework changes, however, every addon that follows the conventions will 'just work' with fastboot.

When Tom says "An App"... he means "Any App"... and that isn't something that I've seen being worked towards by the React community. It IS being done by other communities, as seen in this thread, so I think that it's valid for Tom to call this out as not being analogous.