If I'm not mistaken, a Deep Belief Net or Deep Belief Machine would also be a generative model with enormously greater data efficiency. Comparing against CNNs is a red herring: the advantage of requiring less data to develop a model is more a generative/discriminative issue than it is an "RCN vs everyone else" issue.

What I don't quite understand is why Deep Belief Nets seem to not be getting press these days. For example, see this paper from 2010: http://proceedings.mlr.press/v9/salakhutdinov10a.html.