I found that I had absolutely no need for jQuery, etc. Just do all UI stuff with CSS+HTML and use Knockout's data binding for binding it to data and logic.
Knockout is a little rough and has some weird edge-case gotchas and syntactic inconsistencies but I like it. Might look at Mithril in the future.
Still no JS UI framework nirvana as near as I can see.
I've found Mithril to suit my way of building JS single page apps perfectly, I highly suggest having a play with it. It feels very different to begin with, but once you've grokked it, you can fit the whole "framework" (it's more of a library + conventions) in your head! Thats its most powerful feature for me -- along with the syntax-errors-in-my-templates and the component/module system.
IMO it's close to a data-binding library, rather than a full-fledged framework, it works well, is simple, and relatively performant.