I'd say databinding is useful for smaller convenience plugins, not for the architecture of larger JavaScript applications. From my quick skim this book is spot on.
Sort of? I mean, if you're using models and collections to store _model and collection_ state, then essentially yes, you'll probably have a global variable that namespaces the state of data in your application (or closure-wrapped modules, as the author suggests).
At a certain point (and fairly early, really) keeping the state of an interactive application as HTML nodes is not what I want.
I'm not fond of the way Backbone.js works. It solves none of the hard problems of making an SPA. (AngularJS is guilty of this too, albeit from a different angle.)